Canvs

February wrapped ✨Cassini inspo Sets below ⬇️ • UI components & patterns: workspace.cassiniapp.com/1aecba9e-2f3f-… • Spatial design: workspace.cassiniapp.com/public/d8de63a… • Typography: workspace.cassiniapp.com/public/42f1b7a… • Game design: workspace.cassiniapp.com/public/e771889… What should we curate next? Tell us in the comments.

"Visual Optimism <=> Good vibes" We want to build an inherently optimistic brand for Canvs. Optimism is difficult to sustain, but it's incredibly powerful for both growth and sustainability. Hope keeps us going. But sometimes it needs hard work to be hopeful. Over the course of working on the visual identity, one thing became clear early on: how it felt mattered as much as how it looked. There’s a version of this brand that could have gone darker. We kept seeing that direction everywhere: in dark backgrounds, deeper tones, and a visual language many well-made digital products speak in. It works for some, but it didn’t feel like something we wanted to stay with. We’ve always leaned towards a certain kind of optimism in how we think and work. Although we spend most of our time building with technology, we find it exciting rather than foreboding. The future we want to be a part of is less stark techno-utopia, and more a future where tech assists and exists hand-in-hand with everyday life. So, in a conscious choice, what drew us was something lighter, more open. Visuals that felt fresh, simple, and a little more playful. We wanted the brand to carry that feeling of optimism in a way that’s easy to be around and holds up over time. Colour was important in conveying this. Orange has always been central to how we see things, but the way it’s used changes what it conveys. On darker surfaces, it becomes sharper, more intense. On lighter ones, it feels warmer, closer to a natural glow. That’s what we leaned into. White and light greys gave the system room to breathe, while orange brought in warmth and energy without taking over. The result is a visual language that feels simple and light, playful and warm, yet sophisticated.

Ours is a story of contrasting choices and unexpected backgrounds. As we have developed our studio's identity, one of the tensions we have kept returning to is how we could marry our love for grounded, natural, tactile experiences with the intangibility and virtuality of digital products, which is our bread and butter at Canvs While we have explored materiality and physical textures, we couldn’t lose sight of the fact that we are, fundamentally, a digital practice, and the work still needed to feel native to that world. So we made it a point to tastefully juxtapose our work with natural objects that inspired us, like flora and foliage, rock textures, marine life, etc. At the same time, digital treatments like dithering, tracing lines, and rivets were layered onto objects and surfaces, sitting alongside their physicality rather than overpowering it. Glows were used to bring out form and depth without flattening what made the materials feel grounded in the first place. The idea is to juxtapose and unify rather than establish and highlight contrast, and to let both aspects co-exist. What’s interesting is that none of this came from a system or a predefined rationale. It came from a series of choices; things that we kept returning to, and recognising as our own. And that’s how, somewhere along the way, what we saw on the screen started to feel like us.

For a studio that works in the digital, a surprising amount of what shapes our visual sensibilities at Canvs comes from the objects and experiences around us. From surfaces, materials, textures and the kind of objects you can almost feel, even when you’re looking at them on a screen. We found ourselves drawn to natural forms like rocks and flowers, and textures that felt tactile and real. There’s a kind of simplicity to them, a solidity and dependability that sits well with how we see ourselves. They are what they are. And that way of being feels close to how we think about our work and how we communicate. They are also less metaphors, and more simply, things we instinctively relate to, and want to work with. It is only natural that these elements found their way into how we were building the brand.

We've been working on the Canvs rebrand for a while now, and we want to show you what we've been building. If you've been following along, you've seen pieces of it already, in the work we've shared, long-form pieces, and our website. Now we're putting it all together. There's a lot more we want to talk about, and we'll be rolling it out over the coming days. 🤍

Over the past decade, we've worked on dozens of projects, from early-stage concepts to mature products. Through this work, we developed a practice called approach notes: writing your way into a problem before you design a solution. In this piece, @debprotimroy talks about this approach to designing products through writing. It becomes the bridge between strategy and execution. And the products that feel most coherent are built on this thinking that comes before the first mockup because writing forces clarity. Read it here: canvs.in/blog/most-team…

ViFit was a joint initiative between Vi and Aditya Birla Wellness, a digital health and wellness company. Canvs came on board as ABW's design partner to build the MVP for the app. The goal was to use fitness activity to unlock byte-sized insurance and health benefit plans for users, with challenges on the app powered by ABW. The design challenge was a familiar one in the wellness space: getting people to stay consistent with fitness. The brief called for a gamified experience that felt rewarding, something closer to a game than a health tracker. Have a look at the showcase here: canvs.in/projects/vifit

ICICI Direct is one of India's most established investment platforms. It has grown to meet a wide range of investor needs. But as the ecosystem evolved, so did its complexity: more features, more asset classes, more user types, all sitting inside the same experience. The question was no longer what to build, but where should it go from here. Canvs was brought in to answer that. We approached it as a full case study. It included primary research with 20+ investors, a complete product audit, and benchmarking against the broader ecosystem. We presented our research, insights, and high fidelity prototypes to ICICI Direct’s leadership across multiple sessions, framing them as a business case that set the direction for the app’s future. Read the full case study here: canvs.in/projects/icici…

Designing for a high-volume Forex trading platform, we approached the interface as a collection of reusable modules rather than isolated screens. This allows new features to be built or updated without disrupting the overall experience. Read the full case study: canvs.in/projects/fxtp

Harleen Chatha and Abin Rajan, Senior Design Managers at Canvs, have a conversation about why design-led management makes better business sense and what DMs bring to the table. Their conversation includes insights on: - What actually changes when the DM is a practicing designer, and how it differentiates from a PM or creative manager who's not hands-on in design. - How design managers help the economics of a project for the client. - How DMs make things easier for clients by becoming a single point of contact. - The knowledge and discipline it takes to keep products coherent between the brief and the final product. Read the piece here: canvs.in/blog/why-desig…

The moment we decide to send money, the app is already chosen. There’s no weighing of options, we just know. That kind of no-brainer certainty is the result of dozens of invisible micro-decisions our brain makes over time: how fast it felt, how much we trusted it, what the action gave us beyond just completing the transaction. Those extra opportunities around the core feature that make it hassle-free are what keep products sticking. It can be a myriad of smaller things, like transaction notes so we remember why we sent it, frequent payees surfaced at the top so we're not searching every time, a way to visualise expenditure, and more. Basically, everything we need around the core feature to make our life easier. So the opportunity is not the feature itself, it's everything around it. @debprotimroy and @premankanseal explore this in depth in their latest piece. Read it here: canvs.in/blog/great-pro…

Digital product design often gets reduced to the sum of its parts, like tools and frameworks. But the true work begins far before those are involved, with observation. In this article, Premankan Seal, CDO, Canvs, discusses how the best product designers study the world. Drawing on examples from usability testing, platform trends, and even whimsical apps built purely for delight, he explores how curiosity and attention can transform everyday product decisions, and why designers who only look at design tools often miss the bigger picture. Read it here: canvs.in/blog/developin…

In high-volume Forex trading, traders jump across multiple currency pairs in quick succession throughout their workday. Any friction in switching views here results in potentially lost pricing opportunities. For an FX trading platform we designed for ICICI bank’s Innovation Labs, we built a custom dashboard with a tabbed primary navigation to specifically match these trading patterns. We treated each tab as a fully-loaded workspace for a single pair, complete with its own pricing pods, rule setups, position data, history, blotters and other tools and views. There are a handful Forex trading platforms in the world and most remain legacy experiences with outdated interaction models. We built FXTP with UX improvements traders haven't seen elsewhere. Read the full case study: canvs.in/projects/fxtp

Design systems solve many problems, but one of the harder ones is information density. When building a super-app that brings loans, insurance, and investments under one roof, the volume of financial data a user encounters in a single session is enormous. Without the right visual framework, that density becomes noise. While building Jasper, the design system for a BFSI firm, we knew the app needed high-quality information design to make this work. That meant building a rich library of data visualisation components (graphs, charts, summary views, etc), each designed to give the right financial data the right visual treatment. The variety of components in the system ensures there's always a format that makes dense figures readable, so users can process their finances at a glance and act with confidence. #fintech #design

Couple of days ago, @ArjunRajkishore, Principal Designer at Canvs, held a session for the team to share some pointers on how they can sharpen their craft. We wanted to share those insights with the world as well. So, here's a piece based on that session. It has some concrete ways on how designers can move past their creative plateau, spark fresh thinking, use AI as a creative multiplier, and expand their design skillset. Have a read: canvs.in/blog/expanding…

If your product is already live, accessibility can feel like something you should have addressed earlier, and that it’s too late to fix now. The Canvs R&E team has written a piece that challenges that idea and explains what teams can still improve mid-cycle without having to start from scratch. It walks through practical and incremental fixes around colour contrast, legible typography, clearer visual feedback, and more. Read the piece here: canvs.in/blog/how-do-yo…

Foreign exchange traders operate in a world where milliseconds matter, yet most platforms bury critical price movements in cluttered interfaces or static displays. The challenge in designing for this is making rapid fluctuations immediately scannable for the traders. It’s also a challenge to make sure monitoring multiple currency pairs simultaneously is not overwhelming. While designing for a FXTP platform, Canvs solved for this by designing price pods that isolate the most volatile elements, the changing digits, while keeping static information anchored. The pods update in real-time but use visual hierarchy to draw the eye exactly where market movement is happening. By treating each price pod as a living, responsive element rather than a static data field, the interface transforms how traders absorb information. You can read the full case study here: canvs.in/projects/fxtp #fintech #finance #uxdesign #productdesign