Drupal CanvasDrupal Canvas

Drupal is one of the most powerful content management systems around, and it has a long reputation for being hard to use. Editing content was clunky and building sites was worse. That hurt the people using it, and it hurt Drupal as a platform.

Canvas had to make building and editing pages approachable without losing the power and flexibility that Drupal's users rely on.

I was brought in as a front-end engineer. The project was moving quickly, and nobody had pulled the design work into a system yet, which made the UI hard to build consistently. So I started doing it: auditing the existing designs, consolidating them into components and organising everything into an atomic design system.

That work is how I was offered the Senior Product Designer role at Acquia. From there I led the design of Canvas: a redesign of the entire UI, a rethink of the product shell and how every feature flows, new features, and a lot of time with engineers on how things should behave.

The codebase used Radix as its component library, so the design system had to reflect Radix exactly. I started from Radix's own design file for the basic elements, then removed every option we weren't going to use. With those gone, a designer on the team couldn't make an incorrect UI any more.

Over time I redesigned many of the components to suit Canvas users better, and wrote rules for how to use each one. There are usage guides for icons, colour and type too, so every part of Canvas feels like the same product.

The shell is the frame around everything in Canvas: panels, top bar, and how they respond to what you're doing. It had to work as the site building and editing interface today, and leave room for features we hadn't designed yet.

I kept it as small as possible, expanding only when a task needs more. Adding something to a page or editing what's already there brings up options for that part of the UI. A lot of the work was solving problems we didn't have yet, so new features would slot in without a redesign.

I redesigned every existing feature and designed the new ones from scratch, from the templates panel to the content list and the code editor. Each one started as a detailed user flow. Canvas workflows can get complicated, and the flows let engineers see how I'd turned them into something simple before anyone built anything.

Over the year, three junior designers joined the team under me. Each took on individual features, such as asymmetric translations, and I reviewed what they designed to make sure it fitted the rest of Canvas and made sense to the people using it.

Canvas 1.0 was released on 4 December 2025. Three and a half months later it was on over 4,500 sites. In drupal.org's usage count for the week of 20 September 2026 it was on 13,604, and it hasn't dropped below 7,000 in any week since mid-June.