Visual communications platform Canva has released its 2026 design trends report. With a global community of more than 260 million people, including content creators, professionals across industries, and 95% of Fortune 500 companies, the report highlights the creative patterns that will shape design over the next year.
In addition, Canva has presented its creative DNA of Spain in 2025, a visual summary that celebrates and shows what design and creation has been like in Spain throughout 2025. How many designs have been created in Spain this year? What products and tools have been used the most? What have been the cultural moments of the year in which you have designed the most?
Anyone with a Canva account will be able to discover their own creative DNA through a personalized experience that shows their journey on the platform, an overview of how they design throughout 2025: from the most used design types to the preferred fonts and colors that create their own signature style.
Design trends 2026
After analyzing more than a billion monthly designs and millions of searches and favorites, Canva, working closely with its Designer Advisory Council, has identified the visual styles that will define 2026. Among all the trends, one theme stands out: as AI rapidly evolves and becomes more accessible, creators are looking to balance automation with emotion, personal expression and a unique human touch. It is “imperfect by design.”
Below are the key creative trends to stand out on social media, presentations and in any branded content in 2026:
Major Festival: As the world seeks refuge in the familiar, we’ll see cultural symbols, vintage palettes and everyday pastimes reinterpreted with a touch of drama.
- Interest in “traditional aesthetics” and “urban folklore” has increased this year, generating a total of 1.5 million impressions, demonstrating a shift towards contemporary expressions of the traditional.
Altered Realities: The star trend for 2026 embraces hyperreal compositions, disturbing aesthetics and liminal spaces that blur the boundaries between the authentic and the synthetic. It reflects the growing influence of artificial intelligence and a growing interest in the unexpected, and in those intermediate and transitional spaces that are giving rise to a new visual language.
- Searches related to “liminal” and “haunting” aesthetics have grown by more than 200% compared to the previous year, with more than 2 million views on Canva.
Free Play: Playful digital creativity with a ‘lo-fi’ aesthetic. This trend transforms retro interfaces, drop-down menus, spreadsheets, and simple digital tools into expressive design elements. It is especially popular in social media content, illustration and video.
- Searches for ‘lo-fi’ aesthetics, moving collages and ‘retro-tech’ images have increased by more than 45% in total, generating more than 60,000 searches.
- Popular search terms include: “lo-fi aesthetic” (+500%), “data visualization animation” (+200%), and “video overlay” (+60%).
Editorial Trip: Editorial design with a fanzine spirit for the digital age. This trend combines editorial layouts, zine culture and moodboard compositions, fusing structure with expressive creativity.
- Searches for “zine,” “substack,” and “moodboard” increased 85% compared to the previous year, generating more than 78 million impressions.
Vivid Texture: Tactile and artisanal visual identity. A trend that highlights the growing demand for depth, tactility and sensory design through grain, texture, neutral tones and handcrafted visual elements.
- Searches for “editorial layouts,” “soft neutral backgrounds,” and “tactile layout” increased 30% compared to the previous year, generating nearly 16 million impressions.
Chaos with Style: Scrapbooking and ‘DYI’ based aesthetic. This trend takes advantage of nostalgia and the charm of imperfection, characteristic of artisanal creativity, mixing paper textures, stickers and personal notes.
- Searches for designs related to a scrapbook style and ‘DYI’ tutorials increased by 90% compared to the previous year, surpassing one million impressions.
Do Not Disturb Mode: Less noise, more intention. In response to digital fatigue, this trend focuses on clean design, generous white space, and timeless typography. It represents a return to calm, clarity and determination. It stands out especially in presentations, branding and professional materials.
- Searches for “clean design,” “serif,” and “simple branding” have grown more than 50% compared to the previous year, reaching more than 45 million impressions across the platform.
On Stage: Everyday life, but more cinematic. This trend brings emotion, narrative and theatricality to the design. It is characterized by evocative lighting, expressive typography and compositions that look like scenes from a movie. Driven by the desire to connect, tell stories and escape from an increasingly complex reality.
Searches for resources related to this trend have increased almost 30% compared to the previous year, generating more than 1.7 million impressions.
To help users, creators, teams, and organizations put these trends into practice, Canva has launched the 2026 Creative Trends Toolkit, which includes ready-to-use templates for social media, presentations, videos, websites, branding, and more.
Creative DNA of Spain 2025
Canva has also unveiled for the first time its first Spain 2025 Creative DNA, a visual summary that celebrates and shows how people in Spain have been designing and creating throughout the year. This new snapshot offers a vision of the creative pulse of Spanish men and women. In total, Spain has created 224 million designs in 2025, which represents a notable growth of more than 20% compared to 2024. This reflects how people, teams and organizations continue to trust Canva to communicate visually in a more dynamic and impactful way.
The creative DNA of Spain 2025 also reveals the most popular creative behaviors and design preferences across the country. The five most used Canva products stand out: Presentations, Social Networks, Documents, Videos and Whiteboards.
Looking at Canva’s global data across its more than 12 billion designs, we see that the global community has also unleashed its extraordinary creativity this year. From the most popular design types to the AI tools, colors and fonts that have shaped the year, here’s what has stood out to our global community. Social media content topped the charts with more than 2 billion designs, reflecting the presence that people and companies have had on the internet this year, closely followed by Presentations, Videos, Documents and Whiteboards.
