🎧 listen to Episode #03 with Robin Cannon on what comes after the infinite canvas, and how do we get there?
Y’all know I am fully bought in on design-with-code tools, so I loved this episode with Robin Cannon, VP of Product at Knapsack and former IBM Carbon and J.P. Morgan Salt design system exec, on why he thinks the infinite canvas is obsolete, and what we might replace it with.
I know there’s a lot of chatter about these design with code tools and I hope today’s episode inspires you to check them out, even if you can’t do in your day job.
Read on for a peek into the episode.
Robin chats with us about a future where software design happens in the same medium as production code, making the “infinite canvas” abstraction obsolete. But what does “designing with code” really look like today… and in the future? We explore a world with tools that could enable us to build with design-system rules plus broader product context. Plus we discuss why today’s design-with-code tools aren’t quite there yet, the enterprise barriers to working in new ways, and you as a designer can make this shift.
Robin
When I talk about the canvas becoming obsolete, I really mean like the infinite canvas as an abstraction. I do think like a restricted canvas that uses the things you are allowed to use, but understands when you are talking about or moving something about in plain English, it can reply to you in plain English, but under the hood there is a full understanding of the props, the guidance, honestly, even more than just your design system.
Elyse
Your whole code base.
Robin
Your code base, but your regulatory environment, your accessibility requirements, your brand guidelines, all of these things that exist in a broader product context. Than just your design system guidance and your design system code.
Elyse
Tell me more about this idea of the restricted canvas or like, what do you mean by the canvas? Because I think it's very hard for designers to imagine not having that free blank space. And even on the code side, I've been designing with CSS for the entirety of my career, and even when I start, I'm like, new page, blank screen, start putting some frames on the page. That's divs, it's code rather than using a Figma frame. But it's still starting from that blank space. So if we don't start there, what do we start with?
Robin
I think where we are now, particularly if you have that context, you start with the problem statement and what you're trying to achieve.
And then you can, if you have the right context, you can have AI populate that canvas with what your design system, as interpreted by an AI, would build to solve that problem.
And I think this is one of the biggest things, like a lot of the questions I hear is like, how do I go from my Figma design of a product to that implemented in code? My question is, well, why are you trying to create the abstraction in the first place?
If you have the context that your design system provides, you can say, make me a login form. Or, I need to explore a couple of different flows for signup and registration for X service. And it should be able to create something that is much more adherent than a context less non determinative
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See you next episode!,
