CanvaCopied

In August 2024 Canva unveiled what it called the most significant refresh in its 10-year history. The headline detail was a marketing point as much as a design one: the whole system was made with Canva's own tools.

The gradient logo stayed, and the bespoke typeface Canva Sans was refined rather than replaced. Around them came new layouts, colour, motion and a set of custom emoji. The simplified colour palette meets AA web accessibility standards, a practical choice for a brand used by people of every skill level.

The system borrows from the product: layouts mirror the move from scrolling content to full-screen moments, and cursors, comments and bespoke emojis appear across touchpoints. The palette was simplified to meet AA accessibility standards, and the tone of voice dropped corporate jargon. Canva worked with Vucko on motion and Buck on the emojis, and creative director Ashleigh Bowring said the process was scrappier and more collaborative than anything she had done. The team then rolled it out with Canva's own templates and brand kit to more than 4,000 staff in over 40 countries.

The work was done by Canva's in-house creative team. Canva's Cat van der Werff told The Drum it was more evolution than revolution, improving elements users already knew.

Fast Company read the cutesy surface as cover for bigger enterprise ambitions, which is fair: the refresh was explicitly built to sell Canva to large organisations.

Canva's own newsroom showed where the system went next: a US campaign casting seven real community members from specific industries, showing how they reach personal and professional goals through design, and using every refreshed asset. The company tied the brand work to recent changes in its homepage and editor, with animated cursors and comments meant to make brand and product feel like the same thing. Casting customers instead of models is an old idea, but for a tool whose pitch is that anyone can design, it is the only casting that would not undercut the message.

That is the right approach for a company whose users see the brand every day inside the product. The constraint of building it in Canva is clever too, because it doubles as a product demo: if the in-house team can build a full identity here, so can you. The risk is that the result looks exactly like what it is, a polished template, and some of the layouts do. But the logo and type were never the problem, and Canva had the sense not to fix what was working.