Behind the scenes of Canva's DesignDNA campaign

Summary

Canva launched DesignDNA in December 2024 as a personalized year-in-review campaign to highlight user achievements and showcase generative AI capabilities. Because internal privacy rules strictly prohibited inspecting personal designs, the engineering and creative teams inferred user preferences from the style and theme metadata tags on public templates. An initial keyword-matching algorithm paired 95% of users with one of seven emerging design trends, while generative AI keyword expansion increased coverage to 99%. The team also synthesized over one million localized poems and distinct design personalities using tools like Magic Write and Dream Lab. Finally, dynamic Canva template elements populated through URL parameters assembled 95 million distinct multi-page stories across nine locales.

Takeaways

1. 1

   To protect user privacy without inspecting personal design content, Canva inferred individual styles and themes using the metadata tags of public templates users interacted with.

2. 2

   Combining direct keyword matching with generative AI keyword expansion increased user-to-trend matching coverage from 95% to 99% across the target cohort.

3. 3

   Canva produced personalized stories at scale by dynamically replacing tagged template elements with user-specific data passed through URL parameters across 95 million generated DesignDNAs.