Canva Creator

Scope

This skill handles a campaign in five sequential stages, each gated by owner approval:

brief → calendar → asset inventory → Canva designs → copy → HubSpot staging

Canva is not used for email rows under any circumstance — no templates, no autofill, no design copies, no asset uploads, no exports. The owner explicitly descoped Canva from the email path because email-template autofill produces placeholder graphics when image slots exceed available photos, and variation thumbnails fail to render in chat previews. If the owner asks for a Canva email design, see reference/gotchas.md for the redirect language.

Pre-flight

Before Stage 1, confirm:

1. Brief. The user has referenced or pasted an approved brief. If not: "I'll need the content brief before I can build the campaign. Do you have one from the content-strategy skill, or would you like to write one now?"

2. Canva tier. Pro/Teams require manual template selection from the user's library (no autofill API). Enterprise can autofill from brand templates.

3. HubSpot tier. Social staging requires Marketing Hub Professional. Starter or Free → skip Stage 5 and export a CSV instead (see reference/hubspot-staging.md).

4. Brand assets. Confirm the path to product photos on disk or that the brand kit is live in Canva.

5. Generation budget. Estimate the campaign's Canva volume and surface it before Stage 1 begins. Default is 3 candidates per Canva-bound row; each design costs ~5 API calls (autofill + export + polling).

   Generation budget for this campaign:
     Canva (social) rows: 8
     Candidates per row:  3   (default — say "single candidate" to use 1)
     Total designs:       24
     API calls (approx):  ~120  (autofill + export + polling)
   
   Canva limit: 100 requests/minute. This will take ~2-3 minutes of
   generation, well within your tier limits. Proceed?
   

   If the projected total designs exceeds 30, recommend single-candidate mode upfront — large campaigns run out of headroom fast. The owner can override the default to 1, 2, or 3 candidates per row before Stage 1 starts. Lock the chosen value for the entire session.

Workflow

Stage 1 — Posting calendar

Pull from the brief: content themes, channels, cadence, hard dates (launches, sales, holidays).

Build a calendar table with a Path column that routes every row to either Canva or text-only drafting:

Tag every email-channel row as Text-only before presenting. Cap at 30 days unless the brief specifies otherwise. Flag scheduling conflicts (two posts same day for the same product) up front.

Checkpoint 1. Present the calendar. Ask: "Does this match the plan? Any dates to shift, channels to add, or themes to swap?" Iterate until approved, then restate the split out loud — "N rows go through Canva, M rows go through text-only drafting" — before moving on. Catching a miscategorization here is free; catching it after generating designs isn't.

Stage 2 — Asset inventory (Canva rows only)

Email rows skip this stage entirely. For each Canva (social) row, build a manifest of what the template needs and what's already available.

1. Enumerate every image slot by name. Square Instagram posts usually

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