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The TWIML AI Podcast · 5 min · Nov 10, 2026
Brush revises designs through tools and visual feedback
Brush works on layered designs with tools, from moving elements to building cohesive slide decks.
In this episode
Full analysis- 5:09Canva's data makes smaller design models more economical3 min
- 16:34Detailed scene descriptions help smaller models create better designs5 min
- 39:35Owning the model stack creates more room to cut inference costs4 min
- 10:58Layered designs let people move elements before regenerating pixels4 min
- 22:51Design editing needs benchmarks beyond single-shot generation4 min
- 27:04Style mismatches can be fixed without retraining from scratch3 min
- 31:14Brush revises designs through tools and visual feedback5 min
- 35:48A simpler agent harness lets the model use familiar code paths4 min
“the faster you make that iterative loop, the more effective everything is”
Takeaways
- Brush operates on layered text, vector and image compositions.
- Its tools handle detailed edits and broader deck-level requests.
- Faster loops let the agent revise before human review.
About this segment
Brush works on layered designs with tools, from moving elements to building cohesive slide decks. Its visual feedback loop enables revisions before a person sees the result, so faster inference can improve quality as well as latency.
Stefano Corazza is head of AI research at Canva.
Sam Charrington, Host · Host, The TWIML AI Podcast
From “AI Design Still Feels Like a Slot Machine”, Nov 10, 2026. Watch the full episode
Answers “Are AI agents ready for real work?” See all 114 answers
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 31:17
Is it an editing model? Is it a design agent? A little bit of both of those things? Yeah, we call it like a vision language model, but it's basically an agent that can create design and can also edit design. So it has a deep understanding of what's going on in the layout of your design and can really take very fine-grained directives from humans and then operate on the design itself. So what is a design in this context?
- 31:49
It's not an image, it's, think of it like a slide or a Canva document, multiple, a layered composition of things? Yeah, it could be multiple. Layers could be multiple elements, could also different type of elements. I can have some vector graphics and some image mixed up together and then some text as font. So it's basically this heterogeneous composition of different elements. They have particular features and particular type of details that humans can tweak and also the agent can tweak.
- 32:25
And then they all come together to create that unique design that is the final output. And so it's a little bit like what craft generates in the first step, right? It's basically all the underlying structure of a design. Brush really understands that very well. It can really act on a design and then relay out, can move parts, can make it more readable, more professional, can take high-level inputs like, hey, make this thing pop.
- 32:55
Or like, make it cool. I'm like, you know, make it Gen Z. Like these are, you know, directives that will be extremely hard for a designer that is not maybe a Gen Z designer to really understand, you know. So those are high-level directives instead can really be applied by Brash in a quite successful way. Like I'm kind of thinking about it like, so with craft, you've got this scene creator and you've got this generator and the generator, you know, generates one kind of one image and brush, you have the same scene layout thing, but maybe it has different tools and that, and one of those tools is generating images and it's got, you know, layout tools and the output is like a composition of sorts.
- 33:47
Is that a reasonable way to think about it? Or where does that way of thinking about a breakdown from what's actually happening. Yeah, it's not that far. Like I would say right now, Brush can do more general things than just operating a layout description of the scene. But basically it operates a set of tools, like a large set of tools that are all design tools. It can make decisions on design. I think it goes beyond the image generation and editing, right?
- 34:15
It can also create like, you know, 30 slides deck, can make sure that deck is cohesive with like branding. So I think you operate like a higher level of abstraction than craft, which is really about image and soon we'll be also doing more of image editing. And so, yeah, Brush is basically a full agent that you can ask for like more complex work and more like abstracted type of instructions. And then, you know, we are constantly iterating on, And I mean, it's a lot is like having basically an LLM in the loop using a bunch of tools and be able to see what it generates.
- 34:56
And that loop is really what has changed everything because until, I don't know, a year ago, LLMs would just do like, we're blind and we'll just do a single shot and then be blind to the result, right? And instead now, not only that single shot becomes an iterative process with human in the loop, but LLMs now can see what they generate and can iterate and the faster you make that iterative loop, the more effective everything is because now an ILM can do maybe 10 iterations before it even shows the result to a human and before every iteration would take a minute and so that was now feasible.
- 35:36
But now that's why speed is not just a nice to have. Speed is like a complete game changer because it can really increase the quality, it can increase the user experience, it can really make it like an iterative process. Sounds like there's a simpler way