canvas-design

A guide for creating original visual artwork as PNG images or PDF documents. It starts with a written visual philosophy—a set of ideas about form, space, color, composition, and imagery—then expresses it in the final artwork.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create posters, artwork, or other static visual designs delivered as .png, .pdf, or the supporting .md design philosophy.
Why use it?
It helps turn a broad creative prompt into a coherent visual style and finished static design.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cdeistopened/skill-stack/canvas-design
Any agent
npx skills add cdeistopened/skill-stack --skill canvas-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cdeistopened/skill-stack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,353 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 97% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00059 $0.02353
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.01177
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00471
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00235

Measured 2d ago against content hash a1f288079624, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

canvas-design scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

97% identical to canvas-design — 1 line differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.claude/skills/anthropic-skills/skills/canvas-design/SKILL.md · 130 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 130 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

These are instructions for creating design philosophies - aesthetic movements that are then EXPRESSED VISUALLY. Output only .md files, .pdf files, and .png files.

Complete this in two steps:

  1. Design Philosophy Creation (.md file)
  2. Express by creating it on a canvas (.pdf file or .png file)

First, undertake this task:

DESIGN PHILOSOPHY CREATION

To begin, create a VISUAL PHILOSOPHY (not layouts or templates) that will be interpreted through:

  • Form, space, color, composition
  • Images, graphics, shapes, patterns
  • Minimal text as visual accent

THE CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING

  • What is received: Some subtle input or instructions by the user that should be taken into account, but used as a foundation; it should not constrain creative freedom.
  • What is created: A design philosophy/aesthetic movement.
  • What happens next: Then, the same version receives the philosophy and EXPRESSES IT VISUALLY - creating artifacts that are 90% visual design, 10% essential text.

Consider this approach:

  • Write a manifesto for an art movement
  • The next phase involves making the artwork

The philosophy must emphasize: Visual expression. Spatial communication. Artistic interpretation. Minimal words.

HOW TO GENERATE A VISUAL PHILOSOPHY

Name the movement (1-2 words): "Brutalist Joy" / "Chromatic Silence" / "Metabolist Dreams"

Articulate the philosophy (4-6 paragraphs - concise but complete):

To capture the VISUAL essence, express how the philosophy manifests through:

  • Space and form
  • Color and material
  • Scale and rhythm
  • Composition and balance
  • Visual hierarchy

CRITICAL GUIDELINES:

  • Avoid redundancy: Each design aspect should be mentioned once. Avoid repeating points about color theory, spatial relationships, or typographic principles unless adding new depth.
  • Emphasize craftsmanship REPEATEDLY: The philosophy MUST stress multiple times that the final work should appear as though it took countless hours to create, was labored over with care, and comes from someone at the absolute top of their field. This framing is essential - repeat phrases like "meticulously crafted," "the product of deep expertise," "painstaking attention," "master-level execution."
  • Leave creative space: Remain specific about the aesthetic direction, but concise enough that the next Claude has room to make interpretive choices also at a extremely high level of craftmanship.

Read the full file on GitHub · 130 lines

Files

What ships with it

60 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 130 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A a1f288079624

Subscribe to this mod's changes

canvas-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository cdeistopened/skill-stack (27 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 2,353 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 97% identical to canvas-design, differing in 1 line, and is treated as a copy.

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