Equipping Teams with AI-Powered Graphic Design Skills

NUS is one of Asia's leading universities, with teams across departments constantly producing visual content, social posts, reports and internal communications. As demand for fast, polished materials grew, so did the strain on a small internal design team stretched thin trying to keep up.

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NUS wanted more of its staff to design with confidence, not just push buttons in Canva, but actually understand what makes a design work.

The goal: fewer bottlenecks, faster turnarounds, and better-looking output, without every request routing through a design team or an external vendor.

The training was built around three outcomes:

Graphic Design Fundamentals: Brand kits, layout, typography, visual hierarchy — the fundamentals that hold up even outside Canva.

AI design tools that actually saves time: Canva's Magic Studio suite — Magic Write, Magic Design, Magic Edit, Text to Image and more — to cut first-draft time down to minutes.

Design that fits into how teams already work: Canva's Visual Suite 2.0 (Docs, Whiteboards, Websites, Presentations) so design plugs straight into planning and collaboration, instead of living in its own silo.

Hustle delivered a 24-hour, in-person Generative AI with Graphic Design course split into three hands-on modules:

Design Fundamentals

Before touching any AI tools, participants nailed the basics: setting up a Brand Kit, applying consistent brand guidelines, and mastering layout, spacing, typography and visual hierarchy, plus smart elements like grids, frames and mockups to give finished work a professional edge.

Canva AI in Action

A deep dive into Canva's Magic Studio: Magic Write for captions and copy, Magic Design for instant drafts from a prompt, Magic Edit and Magic Erase for AI-assisted touch-ups, Text to Image for original visuals from scratch, and Translate and Text Animation for multilingual, motion-ready content.

Beyond the Single Design

The final stretch zoomed out from individual designs to full project workflows — Canva Docs, Whiteboards, Websites and Presentations, with live, real-time collaboration so entire teams could work on the same project together.

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