Microsoft Designer is built into Edge

Microsoft is introducing a series of new features to Microsoft Designer, its AI-powered graphic design tool, to streamline the way users create social media posts. The platform will soon be available directly through the Edge web browser and has additional AI-powered creative tools to help it compete with rival graphic design services such as Canva.

Microsoft Designer was first introduced last October and includes AI text conversion features similar to tools like Stable Diffusion. Users can generate images using text prompts, incorporating the results into projects such as invitations, greeting cards, and social media posts. Think of it as a combination of DALL-E and Adobe Express, albeit with significant limitations.

Now, Microsoft is releasing a version of the Designer app for its Edge web browser. Edge Designer is built into the browser’s sidebar so users can start working on a new project and publish it to platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest without switching to another window. It doesn’t require any downloadable extensions and will give suggestions as you work to include in your post.

Starting today, Microsoft Designer can now also generate text using AI. Users can choose a goal from the drop-down menu to angle their copy (such as “increase awareness” or “increase sales or bookings”) and type in a short description of what they want. The app then breaks down hashtags and captions to use in social media posts and even suggests fonts that might pair well with the project.

Microsoft has also made it easy to resize designs by providing up to 20 different social media layout sizes for Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. Elements such as text and images will automatically move to accommodate new layouts, reducing the need to fix any formatting issues.

Animation features have also been introduced to enhance the finished design, allowing users to automatically apply text transitions and animated backgrounds. Microsoft vaguely says the feature uses AI, but doesn’t say whether the platform generates animated assets from scratch, which could mean users have to supply their own. We’ve reached out to the company for clarification and will update this story if we hear back.

There will also be some further updates coming soon that will further expand Designer’s AI-powered features. The new fill tool will allow users to select an area of ​​the design and quickly place an object in that location, while crossing over a person or object with the Erase tool will remove them and generate another image to replace them. Expand Background will fill in any gaps in the foreground of your design, and Replace Background will replace it with a completely new background. Microsoft hasn’t provided a demo to show how these features will actually work, so it’s unclear what role AI will play. The tech giant has carefully avoided saying that any of these features will generate images from scratch.

Microsoft Designer is currently still in preview and does not yet have a full release date. But the waiting list has been removed, so anyone can now access it and see how it stacks up against competitors like Canva and Adobe Express. As it stands, Microsoft still has a long way to go. Both Canva and Adobe have released their own suite of AI-powered features in recent weeks to make graphic design more accessible to beginners.