Create, Autofill And Export On-Brand Designs Automatically With Canva

You have a brand template in Canva and a spreadsheet of names, prices or event dates, and you need a finished graphic for every row: a social post per product, a certificate per attendee, a price card per store. Doing that by hand means opening the template, typing, exporting, and repeating until the afternoon is gone. Canva can do the whole run through an API, which is a way for one piece of software to ask another to do work, so a script, your marketing tool or an AI assistant can fill the template, export the files and hand them back to you.

What Canva does

Canva is the visual design platform most people know from its editor, and Canva says that editor is used by hundreds of millions of people. For a business the interesting part is what sits behind it. Canva describes four developer surfaces: the Connect APIs, a REST API for creating, autofilling, exporting, resizing, importing and commenting on designs from another application; the Apps SDK, for apps that run inside the Canva editor; SCIM and Audit Logs APIs for enterprise identity and compliance; and a partner-gated Print API. Canva also publishes its own OpenAPI description, a dated changelog, per-product llms.txt indexes, a hosted MCP server and a public set of Agent Skills, which is a long way of saying it has done the work to make itself callable by both software and AI assistants.

On APIs.io we break the Connect surface into its parts: Designs, Autofills, Brand Templates, Exports, Resizes, Assets, Folders and Comments, alongside the Apps SDK, the Button API for embedding the editor in your own site, and the Print Partnerships API.

What you can get done

We map Canva’s operations to two business capabilities.

Design & Creative Editing

This is the heart of it: 22 operations for listing, creating and reading designs, walking through their pages, finding out which export formats a design supports, and reading the brand templates and the data fields they expect. An autofill field is a placeholder in a template that a value can be dropped into, and it is what turns one template into a hundred finished designs without anyone opening the editor.

• GET /v1/designs lists or searches your designs, including the ones shared with you rather than created by you.
• POST /v1/designs creates a new design: a blank canvas, a presentation or a custom size.
• GET /v1/designs/{designId} returns a design’s details, including its edit and view links, its owner and a thumbnail.
• GET /v1/designs/{designId}/export-formats tells you which file formats, such as PDF, PNG, JPG, PPTX or MP4, a design can be exported to.
• GET /brand-templates lists the brand templates in your account, and can be narrowed to only those that support autofill.
• GET /v1/designs/{designId}/dataset shows the autofill fields a design contains and what type of value each one takes.

Generative Media

Canva also exposes image generation as a job. You describe the picture you want and the aspect ratio, and you come back for the result when it is ready. Canva meters this with credits.

• POST /v1/image-generations starts an image generation job from a text prompt.
• GET /v1/image-generations/{jobId} checks on that job and returns the generated image once it is finished.

Ask for it in plain language

We have written 25 conversational phrasing overlays for Canva. An overlay is a layer we add on top of the API description that pairs each operation with the kinds of questions a person might ask, so an AI assistant knows which call answers which question. These are the kinds of things it maps:

• How do I list all the designs in my Canva projects?
• How do I create a blank presentation or custom-size design?
• Which file formats can I export this design to?
• What brand templates can I use in my Canva account?
• Can I filter brand templates to only those that support autofill?
• Does my design contain autofill data fields, and what types do they take?

You can see one of them on the Asset API phrasing overlay.

Getting started

Canva is a freemium, hosted service with self-serve signup: you call Canva’s endpoint, and you can create a developer account and start without talking to sales. The Canva developer documentation covers the Apps SDK and the design editing guide shows what an app can do inside the editor, while the Connect API authentication guide is the place to start if you want to drive designs from your own systems. On APIs.io you can browse the Canva profile, the Designs API, the Autofills API, the Brand Templates API and the Exports API. Pick the one template your team fills in most often, confirm it carries autofill fields with the dataset call above, and have the next batch made for you.