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canvas-design

Canvas Design

Canvas Design is Anthropic's open-source agent skill for static visual work: the agent writes a design philosophy, then makes a poster or art piece as a finished PNG or PDF file.

Agent skill by Anthropic Official · Updated

Install Canvas Design

In Claude Code, add Anthropic's skills marketplace

Terminal
/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills

Then install the example-skills plugin, which holds this skill and Anthropic's other example skills

Terminal
/plugin install example-skills@anthropic-agent-skills

Or install only this skill, for any agent, with the skills CLI

Terminal
npx skills add anthropics/skills --skill canvas-design

In Claude.ai, Anthropic says its example skills are already available on paid plans: switch them on under Customize > Skills.

Or paste this into your coding agent: Install the agent skill canvas-design from github.com/anthropics/skills. A skill can include scripts that run on your computer, so read its source first.

What Canvas Design does

Canvas Design is an Anthropic skill for static visual pieces. It loads when you ask for a poster, a piece of art, a design or another static image. Its instructions tell the agent to make original designs and never copy existing artists' work, to avoid copyright problems. The output is a design philosophy as a Markdown file plus the finished piece as a PDF or PNG.

With Canvas Design, the agent first names an aesthetic movement and writes its philosophy in four to six paragraphs. It then expresses that philosophy on a single page that is mostly visual with minimal text, weaving in a subtle reference to your request. It checks that nothing overlaps or falls off the page, then takes a second pass that refines what is already there instead of adding more.

The Canvas Design folder bundles a canvas-fonts directory of typefaces, from serif and sans-serif families to monospace and pixel faces, and the agent picks type from them. When you ask for more pages, it makes them in the same style but each one distinct, bundled into one PDF or several PNGs.

When to use Canvas Design

  • You need a poster or cover image and want a finished PNG or PDF, not a mockup.
  • You want abstract art with a quiet reference to your topic built into it.
  • You want a short series of pages in one consistent visual style.

When to pick something else

  • You want interactive or seeded generative art: use Algorithmic Art.
  • You want a whole web page or app screen designed: use Frontend Design.

Which agents Canvas Design works in

Anthropic documents Canvas Design for Claude Code, Claude.ai, Claude API. The open skills CLI also installs it into 78 agents, including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode (we listed it with the CLI on October 1, 2026). See where each agent looks for skills.

Canvas Design license

Canvas Design is published under Apache-2.0. Apache-2.0 comes from the LICENSE.txt in the skill's own folder (read 2026-10-01); the anthropics/skills repository has no root license file. In practice you may use, change and share the skill in any agent, commercially too, as long as you keep the license text and notices and mark your changes.

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