Applies Anthropic's official brand colors and typography to any sort of artifact that may benefit from having Anthropic's look-and-feel. Use it when brand colors or style guidelines, visual formatting, or company design standards apply.
canvas-design
canvas-design is an open-source design skill for Claude Code and compatible agents, published by anthropics. Its author describes it as: “Create beautiful visual art in .png and .pdf documents using design philosophy. You should use this skill when the user asks to create a poster, piece of art, design, or other static piece. Create original visual desi…”. The project has 170k stars on GitHub and ships custom license terms, so review them before reuse. Add it to your setup with `/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills`.
What canvas-design does
These are instructions for creating design philosophies - aesthetic movements that are then EXPRESSED VISUALLY. Output only .md files, .pdf files, and .png files.
Installation
Add canvas-design to your agent with:
/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skillsAlways review a skill's source before installing it. This command comes from the skill's public repository; the linked repo is the source of truth for exact setup steps.
What's inside
The SKILL.md for canvas-design is organised into these sections:
- DESIGN PHILOSOPHY CREATION
- THE CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING
- HOW TO GENERATE A VISUAL PHILOSOPHY
- PHILOSOPHY EXAMPLES
- ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLES
- DEDUCING THE SUBTLE REFERENCE
- CANVAS CREATION
- FINAL STEP
- MULTI-PAGE OPTION
When to use it
Reach for canvas-design when you want design help from your agent without writing the same instructions every session. Load the skill and the agent picks it up automatically for relevant tasks.
Strengths
- Ships in anthropics/skills, an established project with 170,235 GitHub stars
- Actively maintained (recent commits)
Things to check
- No license declared — confirm terms with the author before reuse
Topics
Frequently asked questions
- What does canvas-design do?
- Create beautiful visual art in .png and .pdf documents using design philosophy. You should use this skill when the user asks to create a poster, piece of art, design, or other static piece. Create original visual designs, never copying existing artists' work to avoid copyright violations.
- How do I install canvas-design?
- Run /plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills in your agent, then reload your skills. Review the source at https://github.com/anthropics/skills before installing.
- Is canvas-design free to use?
- canvas-design is publicly available on GitHub, but anthropics has not declared a standard open-source license (Complete terms in LICENSE.txt). Confirm the terms with the author before reusing it.
- Where does canvas-design come from?
- canvas-design ships inside anthropics/skills, a repository that contains 21 catalogued skills in total. The repository's 170,235 GitHub stars apply to that whole collection, not to this skill on its own.
Related skills
More Design →Use this skill whenever the user wants to do anything with PDF files. This includes reading or extracting text/tables from PDFs, combining or merging multiple PDFs into one, splitting PDFs apart, rotating pages, adding watermarks, creating new PDFs, filling PDF forms, encrypting/decrypting PDFs, extracting images, and OCR on scanned PDFs to make them searchable. If the user mentions a .pdf file or asks to produce one, use this skill.
One-click contribution flow for OpenDesign (nexu-io/open-design) — even for non-coders. Pick one of four cards (ship a Skill or Design System you made with OD; translate docs; fix a typo / write a blog; report a bug), the agent validates and opens a PR (or issue) for you. Trigger words contribute to open design, ship my OD skill, ship my OD design system, translate OD docs, report an OD bug, od-contribute.
A long-form article / blog post — masthead, hero image placeholder, article body with figures and pull quotes, author byline, related posts. Use when the brief asks for "blog", "article", "post", "essay", or "case study".
Structured medical case presentation for clinical rounds, conferences, and documentation. Generates SOAP-format or narrative case reports with physiologically accurate vitals, labs, and evidence-based plans. Use when the brief mentions "case report", "case presentation", "SOAP note", "clinical case", "ward rounds", "case summary", or "patient presentation".