Canvas Mindmapping

Organize insights, strategies, and ideas visually.

Toggle into Canvas Mode to start mapping your thinking in one space. This is where the chaos turns into clarity as you begin to lay out your Pins, sort and collaborate on them in real time.

🎥 See it in action: Watch how to turn scattered Pins into clear thinking on the Canvas.

How to Turn Pins into a Plan

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

1. Start with Colour Coding Drag your Pins onto the Canvas and assign colours to group them by theme, territory, idea type — whatever helps bring structure to the chaos.
2. Find the Thread Use a brand positioning statement, cultural insight, or creative tension as your organising idea. Group Pins around it to surface different directions worth exploring.
3. Make It Collaborative Share the Canvas with your team so they can jump in — adding comments, dragging Pins, or bringing outside context like customer quotes, creative notes, or killer lines from the brief.

Zoom Around with Ease

The Canvas is big — and Zoom is how you make it feel manageable. Whether you’re exploring new space or diving into detail, these quick controls help you move fast.

Use the Zoom dropdown in the top-right corner, or fly around with these keyboard shortcuts:

• Zoom in tracking: Command + scroll with trackpad
• Zoom in: Shift +
• Zoom out: Shift –
• Zoom to fit: Shift 1
• Zoom to selection: Shift 2 (drag your mouse to select what you want to zoom in on)

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:

• Click the dropdown: In the centre of the session name you will see a dropdown button. This will give you options to rename the session or to Export Canvas. Clicking this will enable you to save the Canvas to your local drive as a .png file. Voila!
• Saving 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 harddrive.
• 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.