Canva
Product Design Leadership for AI-Powered Features
At Canva, I’ve worked as a Product Design Lead and Group Design Lead, across two Groups, designing AI-powered tools that make professional design effortless. My contributions span hands-on product design and strategic direction across teams, shaping intuitive, scalable AI-powered experiences.
📌 My Role at Canva:
• Designed AI-powered Styles, Brand Styles & Design Editor Automations enabling one-click professional design.
• Provided strategic design direction for AI-driven features like Magic Write & Layouts.
• Worked cross-functionally with engineers & ML teams, balancing automation with creativity.
• Mentored designers & scaled design processes, fostering a high-impact design culture.
📌 Key Highlights & Impact:
• 🎨 Designed Brand Styles, enabling seamless on-brand designs in one click, showcased live at Canva Create 2024.
• 🏆 Drove growth & engagement for Canva’s “Canva for Work” strategy.
• 🛠 Built & scaled AI design systems, ensuring consistency across features.
• 📝 Defined team processes, retros & documentation, improving design collaboration.
• 🎯 Led a team of designers & researchers, shaping AI-powered creativity at scale.
🎨 Everything you see in this case study is out now on Canva, so go ahead and create yourself something cool!
Role: Product Design Lead
Project: Canva AI-Powered Features
Year: 2022 – Current
Designing Canva’s AI-Powered Styles
The Challenge
Many Canva users, especially non-designers, struggle with visual consistency. They:
• Don’t always know what looks good.
• Want professional designs but lack design expertise.
• Spend too much time manually adjusting layouts, fonts, and colors.
Styles & Brand Styles were designed to solve this problem by enabling users to apply cohesive, professional design elements in one click.
My Approach
Through research, iteration, and prototyping, I improved & designed:
✔ Styles, a feature that allows users to instantly transform designs with curated color and font combinations.
✔ Brand Styles, integrating company brand kits for instant on-brand consistency.
Impact
• Styles usage significantly increased, becoming a core part of Canva’s design experience.
• More users adopted AI-powered design tools, reducing time spent on manual edits.
• Brand consistency improved across Canvas professional users, making it easier for teams to create on-brand designs.
🎤 This work was showcased live on stage at Canva Create 2024, demonstrating the power of AI-assisted design.
Designing Canvas Editor Automations
Designing AI-Powered Design Editor Automations
In addition to Styles upgrades, I personally designed AI-powered automation features within Canva’s Design Editor, allowing users to:
• Automatically tidy up layouts to optimize designs in one click.
• Apply smart recommendations for spacing, alignment, and hierarchy.
• Streamline tedious design tasks, by reducing friction for both beginners and professionals.
Impact
✅ Improved efficiency, reducing the time required for manual layout and spacing adjustments.
✅ Increased adoption of AI-powered features, helping users design faster and more intuitively.
✅ Enhanced user control, ensuring AI automation felt like an enhancement rather than a replacement for creativity.
🚀 These automation features became a core part of Canva’s AI-driven design experience, helping millions of users create effortlessly.
Providing Strategic Design Direction for AI-Powered Features
In addition to my hands-on design work, I provided strategic design leadership as the Group Design Lead for Editing AI, guiding the evolution of Canva’s AI-powered creative tools. Huge kudos to designers Michael Wu & Anna Ngo for their incredible contributions.
Key features I helped shape include:
• Magic Write – AI-powered text generation.
• Layouts – Smart, automated design composition.
• Recommended Fonts & Colors – Intelligent design suggestions for faster workflows.
My Role
🔹 Provided UX feedback, critiques, and guidance to ensure AI-driven features were intuitive and aligned with Canva’s design philosophy.
🔹 Collaborated with machine learning engineers & product teams, balancing automation with user creativity.
🔹 Led design discussions on AI ethics & user control, ensuring AI tools enhanced user workflows rather than replacing creativity.
🚀 Impact:
✅ Ensured AI-powered design tools remained accessible and easy to use.
✅ Aligned automation with user intent, reducing friction in creative workflows.
✅ Helped refine AI-generated outputs, improving relevance and usability.
Scaling AI Design: Leadership & Team Processes
Beyond feature design, I also played a key role in scaling the AI design function at Canva by:
• Developing scalable design systems, improving consistency across AI-powered features.
• Establishing ways of working guides & project documentation, ensuring clarity across teams.
• Facilitating retros, critiques, and design reviews, creating a fast-moving, feedback-driven culture.
🚀 Impact:
✅ Faster collaboration between design, engineering, and product teams.
✅ Increased design consistency across AI-powered features.
✅ Improved team efficiency, reducing iteration cycles and increasing velocity.
What This Project Achieved
📊 Business Impact:
✔ Drove increased adoption of AI-powered design automation, improving workflow efficiency.
✔ Helped businesses and teams maintain brand consistency with faster, more intuitive styling tools.
✔ Streamlined team workflows, enabling faster product iterations & feature releases.
🎯 Customer Experience Improvements:
✔ Faster, more intuitive design workflows, reducing manual editing time.
✔ More accessible AI-powered tools, making design effortless for non-designers.
✔ Stronger brand adoption, enabling professional users to create on-brand content instantly.
Reflections & Learnings
Working at Canva has reinforced the importance of:
✨ AI as a creative assistant – The best AI tools empower users, not replace them.
✨ Speed & automation – Helping users create effortlessly is key to adoption.
✨ Balancing hands-on design leadership with strategic influence – Navigating both product and group leadership roles has shaped how I lead teams and scale design.
🎨 Canva moves fast, builds with purpose, and constantly redefines what’s possible in design automation. It’s exciting to keep pushing the boundaries of AI-powered creativity.