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Canva Just Fixed the Biggest Problem in AI Design
718 Plays2 days ago
AI marketing podcast episode, Dan Sanchez breaks down why Canva’s new Magic Layers feature could be a major turning point for marketers who need fast, polished design work without deep Photoshop skills. He walks through a real-world workflow that starts with ChatGPT for concept generation and ends in Canva for practical editing, showing how solo marketers and small teams can turn rough AI-generated visuals into usable campaign assets.
My Favorite AI Tools
- Tella - https://danchez.com/tella
- High Level - https://danchez.com/highlevel
- Zencastr - https://danchez.com/podtools
- n8n - https://danchez.com/n8n
Resources Mentioned
- Canva
- Adobe Photoshop
- ChatGPT
- Nano Banana
- Gemini
- Replit
- YouTube
- GoFullPage Chrome extension
- Trim Healthy Mama
Timestamps
- 00:00 — Why AI design tools are starting to make every marketer a de facto art director
- 01:50 — The real-world use case: creating a keynote speaker announcement graphic for an event
- 03:54 — Starting in ChatGPT: using vague creative direction, reference assets, and website screenshots to generate better design concepts
- 06:31 — Pro tips for prompting design AI: provide assets, show visual references, and avoid over-specifying fonts
- 09:06 — The old workflow: breaking apart AI images in Photoshop and why it was too hard for most marketers
- 11:03 — The new workflow in Canva Magic Layers: uploading a ChatGPT image and turning it into editable design elements
- 14:04 — What Magic Layers gets right, where it still falls short, and why it is still close enough to be a game changer
- 18:33 — Final takeaway: why Canva Pro may now be a must-have subscription for marketers, freelancers, and business owners
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Transcript
Intro
Impact of AI on Design Roles
00:00:04
Speaker
Okay, I'm a little nervous for graphic designers right now because it's starting to get real when it comes to AI tools being applied to design because now marketers are able to become designers. And I did an episode on this a few weeks ago in an episode of
Essential New Tool for Marketers
00:00:20
Speaker
Bot Bros. But today, i have a new announcement around a tool that I think every single marketer needs to have a subscription to. It is a low cost and it will save you so much time and frustration.
Introduction to Canva Magic Layers
00:00:31
Speaker
And it is Hanva.
00:00:34
Speaker
I know, lot of tool that you a lot of you already use. I haven't. I've always been an Adobe guy. But over the last few weeks, Canva has dropped this tool that is just freaking magic. In fact, they even named it after magic. It's called Magic Layers. And it is something that is revolutionizing my design workflow already. So in this episode, I wanted to give you a preview of what it looks like, how I'm incorporating it into my workflow as a marketer, and what you need to look for now as as as a designer. Because...
00:01:03
Speaker
All marketers, you're pretty much now a designer. The design tools make it possible. And I guess it's the AI doing the design. But really, now you're essentially the art director curating, fixing, and adjusting and getting stuff s sent. And doesn't mean you don't need a designer. You probably should have a designer still on staff because they can go faster and push it even harder than you can. They have a sense of taste that maybe you don't have. If you don't have that sense of taste, definitely a hire designer to help
Magic Layers for Small Teams
00:01:29
Speaker
you. But if you're a solopreneur, if you are building a business of one or you're just a marketing team of one, this is going to revolutionize everything that you do when it comes to graphic design. So pay attention I'm going walk you through exactly how to use this tool, what I'm already doing with it, and show you my workflow of how I'm using something like ChatGPT in tandem with Canva's new Magic Layers feature.
Visual Walkthrough and Design Challenges
00:01:54
Speaker
So welcome back to the AI driver marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez. My friends call me Danchez. And today we're to be I'm going to be sharing my screen a lot because I this is a visual thing.
00:02:06
Speaker
So if you're listening into the audio, just know I'm going to do my best to describe it. So if you're doing a workout, if you're if you're driving along in the car somewhere and then come back to the video version on YouTube, if you want to go through the step by step. But I promise everything I'm saying, I i will be showing visually. And if you're if you're listening, just now I'll be describing what I'm seeing as I'm seeing it. But, you know, preview it with the audio and then come back to the video and watch it sometime. So here we go. I had a project this week, which is a very common project. I needed to make an announcement about a new speaker at the event. Again, I'm working for a company called Trim Healthy Mama. It is a creator-led business with two ladies, two two mothers, uh that wrote a book that went like viral hit the new york times bestseller many years ago and now they have a whole e-commerce company where they sell supplements and all kinds of things and books lots of books and they have an event coming up this summer called the gathering it's for the audience you know but a lot of you marketers you've had to promote events before you've had to make announcements on social and i needed to come up with a graphic announcing a new big keynoter right we just landed Lisa Brevere, which is a big deal to this particular audience. And if you don't know who it is, it doesn't really matter. But you've all had to make announcements like this one. and I have to come up with a graphic. And this is a big keynote person. It's got to look important. I was like, oh like I could design this from scratch in Photoshop, but I don't even know where to start. Sometimes you just end up with blank page syndrome and you're just kind of like, ugh. Even when you know how to design, sometimes it can be intimidating stepping up to that blank page not knowing. So most designers usually go through Pinterest and start looking for our inspiration. And you pick a few, you combine them, you build it. It takes forever just to build one simple graphic. And the rest of us, you know, you go into Canva, pick a template, slap the the speaker's photo in there, change the name and call it call it day. But it's an okay, you know, ish looking graphic. So let me show you my process of what I
ChatGPT in Design Ideation
00:03:56
Speaker
did.
00:03:57
Speaker
I started off in ChatGPTs. I just find ChatGPT to be a great design tool. It's better than Nano Banana. It's as good as Nano Banana is, even with version two, man. ChatGPT is just really good at dealing with the ambiguous. Like you can give a, make me an announcement, make it look important. That's kind of ambiguous. And then say, make it look fancy. You're like, gosh, that's that's if you give designers that language, they're gotten good at interpret interpreting ambiguity. But dang, as a designer, you're like, what is fancy? What does fancy mean to you? You got it. You got to actually pull that out and interview people to get it out of them. But Chad, you but he's pretty good at interpreting it.
00:04:31
Speaker
Nano Banana, more of a struggle, more of a struggle dealing with ambiguity. ChatGPT is pretty good at it. So that's why I start with ChatGPT and often go into Nano Banana to refine. But now, Mike, I might not need Nano Banana to refine, except for a few certain situations, because now I could do it in Canva. So let me show you what I got. In my ChatGPT account, I gave it a basic prompt. I said, I need a speaker announcement graphic to announce that Lisa Brevere is speaking at the gathering. Should be a taller rectangle graphic attached as a photo of Lisa and a screenshot of the website design of what the website design looks like for you to emulate. Make it less whimsical and more like a design in the website. Sophisticated. That actually ended being a second, like this whole make it less whimsical because the first one I did, which is what I'm going to show you, was little bit too whimsical. I might still test it as a Facebook ad, but that's the one I'm going to show you because the one it gave me below is more like the one we actually ran.
00:05:27
Speaker
More of a straightforward, looks kind of like an elegant looking book cover, I guess, which was fine. But the one that it ended up giving me ended up looking more like this, right? So this is more, it's almost like it could be a full movie poster level design. It's it's something that I would have never been able to come up with myself. It's glowing, it's radiant, it literally looks like a movie poster. It's it's good.
00:05:51
Speaker
And it's beyond what I would have been able to design myself as a designer I just wouldn't have been able to hit this. But it's not all correct. The logo for the gathering is almost there, even though it had a picture of it, but it's not quite there. And you know, a logo, you probably need to stick to the exact logo. And then some of the information on it was wrong. has the wrong dates. It's got the wrong yeah URL because I didn't give it to the yeah URL. So hallucinated that bit.
00:06:16
Speaker
And that's fine. By the way, got to say, like when you're asking it to design things for you, this is a little pro tip when you're asking Gemini or ChatGPT to design things for you. Give it the assets. So like I gave it a photo of Lisa because I needed that in there. But I also gave it the whole web design.
00:06:32
Speaker
Like this whole website I made for the gathering, this is built with Replit, by the way. So like Replit designed this and made it, it's a pretty nice looking website, it's sophisticated, elegant, simple, but it's like, it's it's a nice looking website. It looks like it's for a conference that you'd want to go to, right? Or at least that the target audience would want to go to.
00:06:49
Speaker
It looks nice. Another pro tip, this is a tip on top of the tip. If you ever want to take a website design and get the full picture of it, there's this great little Chrome plugin called, what is it called? I'm going hover over Go Full Page. I have this pinned in my Chrome browser all the time simply so I can click it and it literally takes photos of all the different parts of a long landing page like this one. and then stitches it together in a single image. The
Design Output Challenges and Solutions
00:07:17
Speaker
work that this would have taken in Photoshop is intense.
00:07:21
Speaker
It's hard to stitch it together to make it look like one page. But now I have a full image of this one website. So if I want ChatGPT to understand what the design concepts of this thing look like, and What needs to be there? and It's got a little long, but ChatGPT can handle it. You can see I attached it here in the original prompt, and I said reference the design of the landing page, and ChatGPT can look at it intelligently, and that's why even this graphic looks like it belongs to the website design. It's got the right-looking fonts. It's got the right color palette, and it just looks like it belongs to the same design.
00:07:53
Speaker
So instead of describing your design that you want, you can, it helps to describe it. Also, just give it a sample of what you want it to look like. Also, you can't give it specific fonts. I see people do this all the time. Oh, here's my color codes. Here's my specific fonts. Don't do that. Don't do that. Just show it.
00:08:10
Speaker
Just show it. It's not going to be perfect because it can't pull in fonts. It can only kind of emulate the the font look, you know, and it gets pretty close. So you could see it and it kind of hallucinated the image, but it kind of understood that it's trim healthy mama with the butterfly, but it's not the right logo. And this is where, you know, so we end up with something like this or we end up with something like this and it looks good, but it's not quite right. The dates are wrong and it looks beautiful, except you got to change the fonts. Right. And it's in some of the text is wrong and it's got the wrong information. So most people go through prompting hell in order to get it through. Because you're like, no, can you change this? And then it comes back and it's not quite the same and it hallucinates something else. And you just go through prompt after prompt after prompt.
00:08:57
Speaker
And it's exhausting. And that's why most people end up still going back to Canva or to their graphic designer. Because before, this was impossible to deal with. But it is no more. to kind of give you an example of how I dealt with it before is I would open this graphic up and something like a Photoshop, like use the marquee tool to select something that I didn't want there. And I'd have to say, go to generative fill and say like, remove text. Probably the most common thing that I do in Photoshop now is just going to Photoshop. And it's good. You know, like I can highlight over the gathering, the logo that it messed up in Photoshop, say remove text. And then bam, the text is gone. And yeah,
00:09:34
Speaker
Let's see, next I could just drop in the Gathering logo where it's supposed to be, resize it, you know, I have to restylize it, add a little drop shadow to make it stand out a little bit more, and I'm getting there. You know, and I'd have to do this for every little section that I wanted to change,
00:09:49
Speaker
in in this design layout, right? I have to go and say, remove text from this part and then reset the text. And it wasn't hard. It was honestly a lot easier to deconstruct an AI image in Photoshop than it was to build it from scratch, for sure. So I did it and it was way faster and it was amazing. I loved the process. The problem with that is, is unless you have Photoshop skills, this was really hard, pretty much out of reach for most people. And so my...
00:10:17
Speaker
My friends like Ken Ferreira, who I co-wrote, own the show with, would struggle because they tried to get into Photoshop and not be able to quite tear it apart like they needed to. So he'd kind of use Nano Banana to use for edits because Nano Banana could do more precise edits, but it would hallucinate too and mess up. So this is the process we can now leave
Canva vs. Traditional Tools
00:10:34
Speaker
behind. And I'm seriously considering dropping Photoshop entirely. And I'm now exploring if Canva can take up all the rest of my Adobe needs with vector illustrations and maybe some, I don't know if I need it for print because who does print anymore? Click that. All right, ever it's just rare. I don't do it hardly ever anymore. But I'm now exploring to see if I could just use Canva entirely rather than Adobe because Canva has this new tool and that's what you're here for. It's what I wanna show you because we're gonna take this same image. I wanna show you the magic that now is Canva because again, it's called Magic Layers. And if you're logged into Canva on the home screen, it's now this little icon just below the little search bar where you can search for designs and uploads and all kinds of things. And now just click on that
00:11:17
Speaker
And I'll go ahead and select that same image that ChatGPT gave me. It's got Lisa Prevere, and it says it's speaking at the gathering, and it's got the wrong logo. It's got some of the wrong text on it, but it's good. I'm just going to upload it as I downloaded it from ChatGPT. And as soon as I get it, ChatGPT goes to work, and it gives you this graphic that looks like it's scanning it, scanning for error, you know, like that kind of little scan swipe going on. And it takes...
00:11:41
Speaker
I think it takes less than a minute. We're just going to watch and see it go by right now. And it's doing its work. It's going to make it so this, oh, there, it's already done. And look at that. You could tell that some of the fonts have changed, but it's still pretty close. And if I click it, like I'm hovering over Lisa Brevere, the photo, and I can actually click her and move her anywhere I need in this whole layout and it is perfect her hair looks fantastic like all the little details of her photo are cut out better than if I had cut it out myself in Photoshop so I'm gonna go ahead and put that back where it was because actually like the positioning of where she was and the exciting announcement text they turned into a graphic rather than text that's okay but at least it's now easy to move and The Gathering is now a graphic too, so I'm just going to go ahead and delete that. And just like I did in Photoshop, I'm going to grab, drag in the Gathering logo and bam, it's looking good. And all the text has been converted to the closest font.
00:12:41
Speaker
Let get rid of this. It's been cloded to the converse...
00:12:45
Speaker
And all the text has been converted to an editable font. Yes. So now I can come in here and say, no, it's from the 9th, July 9th to the 11th, not the 15th through the 17th, because that was wrong. And now I can come in here. i still have to get used to Canva, by the way.
00:13:04
Speaker
And now I can come in here and change URL. url
00:13:10
Speaker
and actually get that right at the bottom of this little graphic that I want to post to social, and it's done. It's all editable. I can move things around. i can edit to my heart's desire. I can even readjust this little line just above her head, and then bam, we are now done, and I can export this as a graphic, and I can move it around. I can save it for later. This is magic.
00:13:34
Speaker
The ability to take what ChatGPT gave me and it converts into this is just amazing. Now, some caveats. It doesn't do a perfect job, like this exciting announcement piece is not as nice as it was as what ChatGPT had made. In fact, let me open up the original image, and you can see some things change from here to there. You can see it's not quite the right font. It's it's a little bit heavier on the feet of the serif. You know, this is all little design nuances, most of Most of y'all, this is going to be pretty dang good. Like, and yeah, could still change the font out because it's editable. I can go and find a serif that more closely matches what ChatGPT gave. Now, what's the font ChatGPT had? I don't know. ChatGPT doesn't have specific fonts. It just designs, you know, it's doing it by pixel, not by font. So you have to look for something that looks similar. You can ask it for recommendations if you want to, but you know, it's not going to be entirely perfect. But it's pretty close. Look at the before and after on the screen here. It is dang close to what I had with ChatGPT.
00:14:33
Speaker
And honestly, i love that I now have this option. This is going to change the game for a lot of you out there because you don't need Photoshop to reconstruct it anymore. The subscription for this is about $15 a month for Canva Pro, and that's it. You don't get it with free. you do have to pay $15, but it certainly beats the heck out of an $80 month or more Adobe subscription in order to get like the whole suite to be able to edit things or even just the, you know, the subscription you would need just for Photoshop alone, which is an incredibly heavy tool and hard to learn tool where Canva is much easier. In fact, you don't even have to learn all the little things in Canva because you just dropp this drop drop drag and drop this graphic in here It does the work for you, and then you can just do the slight edits that you need to make. No design skills required. Just make a few edits and leave things the way they are because chances are ChatGPT is a better designer than you, and so just leave it with whatever design choices ChatGPT make.
00:15:27
Speaker
Leave it. Just stick with it. Design advice for marketers. As I was working on a thumbnail for this very show. Now, I made this thumbnail and I had Canva recreate it It's like a rest in peace Photoshop kind of thing going on. And it did a great job. But I want to show some details, some differences between the two.
00:15:46
Speaker
This tool isn't perfect. As you can tell from this original file that I got from ChatGPT, yes, it gave me like a repetitive, it had resting head the, that there what do you call this?
00:15:57
Speaker
The caption and the the thumbnail twice. It said, RIP Photoshop, RIP Photoshop, one on the gravestone and one as a header. And that doesn't make sense. So I just got rid of the one in the header. But look at the difference in even the way the words look on the gravestone. You could tell the one in ChatGPT looks better It's got a little bit more of the color bouncing onto it. It just looks like it's part of the image better versus in Canva. You could tell it doesn't have quite the color splash. It's not overlapping with Travis's hair as much. It's just not quite as, I guess, what do you call that? Like as cohesive of as what ChatGPT gave earlier.
00:16:31
Speaker
But I have to say it's pretty dang close. Close enough that if I were recreating it, I would have run into the same issue. And you could probably still, if you're really good with Canva, recreate some of the effects of that. But look at what it did do. It still gave me a pretty close font comparison on most of this. It looks like the rest in peace Canva that ChatGPT had got converted to a sans serif that matches the Photoshop one.
00:16:54
Speaker
And that's fine. But it's still a white one. And it still gave it this almost very similar looking drop shadow. So you could tell that it's actually doing multiple things. It's not just looking at the font, but it's looking at the font color and the font treatment here with this drop shadow underneath this, the word Photoshop. So it's good to know that it's going pretty far in getting you to the original image that was in this compressed one version, one image design here.
00:17:23
Speaker
and it separates out all the little meaningful things into separate images. So you could say I have myself and I have Travis here, but of course Travis isn't here, so I might remove Travis from the image, and then I might need to recenter everything else into the image. Now I might recreate this entirely as now my arm is getting cut off. I might have ChatGPT to read you on this one. But now it's possible to do that because everything's an editable piece.
00:17:53
Speaker
Or I might just extend this background graphic where Travis was
00:17:58
Speaker
to give it more visual interest on this side. Ultimately, I think when we need to come back and restart from scratch and have ChatGPT try again. But having this in cam in Canva now gives you way more ability to just move things around a little bit and try. To be able to edit things, to be able to make corrections that you just couldn't before. Now it's possible. So give it a try. You could do a free trial of Canva.
00:18:22
Speaker
I think there's like a seven day, 14 day free trial or something. I don't quite remember, but I remember I've done free trials of Canva before. And I'm going to recommend this to all of you. If you don't have a Canva subscription, you need to get one. Unless you touch no design work, like no design passes your desk.
00:18:38
Speaker
you should probably get one. You should probably start experimenting with this. If you're a business owner, if you're a freelancer, you have to have a Canva subscription because this feature is just overpowered.
Canva as an Adobe Competitor
00:18:48
Speaker
And I think cam this is where Canva is going to start overtaking Adobe. If you didn't know, Adobe's CEO is stepping down because it's getting harder and more competitive and harder for that big old company to keep up.
00:19:01
Speaker
I think this is where Canva is going to start to shine with their smaller fee and their smaller, I don't know, light more lightweight design tools because AI started to fill in the gaps of what non designers can make.
00:19:12
Speaker
And it's not that designers are going to go away again, designers are going to be able to take this and hopefully run even farther with it than us marketers could. But for things like little announcements, little graphics, little Facebook cover photos, and all that kind of stuff that we have to do all the time, email headers, whatever.
00:19:28
Speaker
This is a game changer. ChatGPT or Gemini plus Canva now gives you a creative powerhouse and you don't have to be very skilled in order to move the ball down the field.