The canvas
Links, embeds and colour palettes
Three ways to put something on a board that did not come from a file: a URL, a live page, and a weighted set of colours.
Three things share this page because they solve the same problem. A board fills up with what you made, and it also needs the things that informed it, none of which arrive as a file you can drag in. ## Links Paste a URL onto the canvas and it becomes a card with the page's title and preview, sitting wherever you dropped it. The value is proximity. A reference link three windows away in a browser is a link nobody opens; the same link beside the work it informed gets read, and six weeks later it still explains where the direction came from. ## Embeds Some URLs become the thing rather than a card about it. - A **YouTube** or **Vimeo** URL renders as a player you can scrub in place - A **web page** renders as the live page, scrollable and interactive inside its frame Embeds are sized in real pixels rather than by scaling a smaller element up, so an enlarged embed keeps its pointer coordinates honest and a click inside it lands where you aimed. :::caution[An embed is live, not a snapshot] The page inside the frame is the page as it is now. That is what you want for a dashboard or a spec and not what you want as a record of what something looked like when you made the decision. For that, screenshot it and drop the image in. ::: ## Colour palettes A palette is a horizontal strip of colours on the canvas, and it is the strip itself that you edit rather than a panel somewhere else. Open it from the frame button's chevron in the bottom toolbar. - Drag a divider to change the ratio between two colours - Click a segment to open the colour picker on it - Use the affordances on a segment edge to add or remove a stop That ratio is the part most colour tools leave out. A palette here is **weighted**, so it carries how much of each colour as well as which ones, and that turns a set of swatches into an actual description of a look. ### Dragging a palette into a tool Drag a palette onto a tool that takes one and the tool generates inside your colours. Two tools accept a palette today, and they use it differently: - **diverge** keeps every cell inside your colours while re-inventing scale, world, material and light, so six directions come back that all belong to the same brand - **recolor** applies the colours to an image you already have :::note[This is different from the palette a tool extracts] Some tool cards show a colour strip pulled out of an image you dropped on them. That is the tool reading your reference. A canvas palette is one you built and can reuse across boards, and it is the one you drag. :::Three things share this page because they solve the same problem. A board fills up with what you made, and it also needs the things that informed it, none of which arrive as a file you can drag in.
Paste a URL onto the canvas and it becomes a card with the page’s title and preview, sitting wherever you dropped it.
The value is proximity. A reference link three windows away in a browser is a link nobody opens; the same link beside the work it informed gets read, and six weeks later it still explains where the direction came from.
Embeds
Section titled “Embeds”Some URLs become the thing rather than a card about it.
- A YouTube or Vimeo URL renders as a player you can scrub in place
- A web page renders as the live page, scrollable and interactive inside its frame
Embeds are sized in real pixels rather than by scaling a smaller element up, so an enlarged embed keeps its pointer coordinates honest and a click inside it lands where you aimed.
Colour palettes
Section titled “Colour palettes”A palette is a horizontal strip of colours on the canvas, and it is the strip itself that you edit rather than a panel somewhere else. Open it from the frame button’s chevron in the bottom toolbar.
- Drag a divider to change the ratio between two colours
- Click a segment to open the colour picker on it
- Use the affordances on a segment edge to add or remove a stop
That ratio is the part most colour tools leave out. A palette here is weighted, so it carries how much of each colour as well as which ones, and that turns a set of swatches into an actual description of a look.
Dragging a palette into a tool
Section titled “Dragging a palette into a tool”Drag a palette onto a tool that takes one and the tool generates inside your colours.
Two tools accept a palette today, and they use it differently:
- diverge keeps every cell inside your colours while re-inventing scale, world, material and light, so six directions come back that all belong to the same brand
- recolor applies the colours to an image you already have