Canvas Mode

What’s this for?

Canvas Mode gives you a spacious, drag-and-drop workspace to start organizing your ideas and mapping out strategic or creative directions. It’s built for collaboration, just drag Pins from the Pin Bar into the Canvas to share them with your team.

Once a Pin is in the Canvas, anyone you’ve invited can see it and contribute. You can even invite people who don’t have a Springboards account to view and leave comments.

Here’s what you’ll see in Canvas Mode:

1. Your Canvas Tool Bar.
2. Your Boards and outputs, a mini focus mode. Toggle back over if you're not ready to start organizing your thoughts yet
3. Your Pin Bar, where all your pins live, ready to be dragged onto the Canvas and organized 
4. The Share button, to bring teammates in on your thinking

Canvas Mind Mapping

Ready to shape the chaos? These steps help you move from a stack of sparks and pins to something you can actually use.

1. Start with Color Coding: Drag your Pins onto the Canvas and assign colors to group them by theme, territory, or idea type. Whatever helps bring structure to the chaos.
2. Turn your pins into a story:
   1. Find the thread: Use a brand positioning statement, cultural insight, or creative tension as your organizing idea. Group Pins around it to surface different directions worth exploring. 
   2. Create the thread: Leverage Center Chat’s eyes on canvas 
3. Make It Collaborative. Share the Canvas with your team, so they can jump in: add comments, drag in Pins, or bring in outside context like customer quotes, creative notes, or killer lines from the brief.

Canvas Toolbar

	Boards & Pins Buttons: Toggling these off removes your pin bar and boards from canvas ,giving more screen space to organize ideas.
	Selecter Tool: For moving pins around.
	Move Mode: For moving around your canvas. (pinch to zoom and two finger swipes work for those with a track pad!)
	Comment Tool: Add comments on specific pins, tag your coworkers and keep the ideation going.
	Stamps: for quick reactions to pins, great for facilitating a team wide brainstorm!
	Canvas Templates: helpful canvas layouts for repeatable processes. Leverage premade Springboards templates or build your own!
	Chat: Query pins on your canvas and bounce ideas around.
	Text Tool
	Undo, Redo

Export like a Pro

Once your Canvas is complete , you might need to work with it or show it to others outside of the Springboards platform.

To export a Canvas:

1. Click the dropdown: In the center of the session name you will see a dropdown button. This will give you options to rename the session, export canvas, duplicate canvas, clear chat and delete your session. Clicking Export Canvas will enable you to save the Canvas to your local drive as a .png file. Voila!

1. Exporting a section: Sometimes you might not want the entire canvas and only a section. To export a section simply drag + highlight all the boxes you wish to export as a .png and right click to 'save as' a .png to your hard drive.

1. Copying pins into a word doc: To extract pins from your Canvas, drag to highlight the boxes you want, then press Command+C (Mac) or Ctrl+C (Windows) to copy. Open your Word doc and press Command+V or Ctrl+V to paste.

Pro tips:

• Utilize text boxes to create signposts or title cards to represent different territories for easy ideation.
• Experiment with adding pictures to your Canvas. Either drag in images you’ve generated from the Concept Machine or send images to the canvas from Center Chat by right clicking. You can always copy and paste images in from the web too!
• Gone a little wide with your initial exploration? Use center chats eyes on canvas to help weave through-lines or look for gaps.