Canva’s Newsroom post introduces Canva Craft as the first state-of-the-art image generation model developed and trained by Canva Research, and presents it as available starting that announcement day. DigIntoAI’s news desk places the announce window around October 22, 2026 Beijing time; the Newsroom page does not publish a clock time, so this article does not invent one.
Two surfaces matter, and they are not the same product path. In Canva, Craft is available globally through Dream Lab (Newsroom: open Dream Lab in the bottom-left panel). Separately, developers can call Canva’s public Create image generation job endpoint (POST https://api.canva.com/rest/v1/image-generations). To pin Craft, set model to craft_v1_2k—docs describe it as CRAFT-1 2K, Canva’s first-party image generation model. The same preview endpoint also lists lucid_origin and z_image_turbo as other model options; this article only treats craft_v1_2k as the Craft path.
Newsroom product claims for Craft include up to 2K resolution and many aspect ratios (Newsroom: more than 30). It briefly describes a two-stage architecture that plans composition before rendering. Faster variants named Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast are framed as upcoming. On rankings, Canva states that DesignArena rankings make Canva Research the world’s second most advanced AI lab for image generation, that Craft debuted as the fourth most advanced image generation model on DesignArena, and that Craft outputs rank #1 in People & Portraits and Landscapes & Nature among listed model counts—those figures are Canva’s own citations of DesignArena, not an independent check by us.
Developer notes from the API docs: the image-generation API is currently a preview (possible unannounced breaking changes; public apps that use preview APIs will not pass review). Calls need a user access token with asset:write; starting a job consumes the user’s AI credit allowance and can return 429 with credit_quota_exceeded when the allowance is exhausted. Newsroom also lists Canva MCP as Coming Soon for connecting Craft to assistants and automated workflows—it is not generally available yet.
For Craft image quality, Dream Lab feel, API reliability, credit metering, and DesignArena standings, we have not tested yet. If you have used them, you can reach the site owner through the contact link in the footer. This Canva Dream Lab release is a different product from a separately named Dream Labs offering covered elsewhere on DigIntoAI. Related reading: Are OpenAI's Aurora Alpha Models Image Generators?, Framer MCP Connects Claude, Codex, and Cursor, and Cursor Cloud Agents: Interactive Canvas, Environments API.