Working with Canvas Objects

Everything you place on a Kanvas Designer canvas is an object, and every object answers to the same small set of gestures. You add it, you style it, you copy or clone it, you lock it so nobody nudges it, you resize it, and eventually you delete it. That is true whether the object is an Amazon EKS cluster, a dashed section drawn around a group of services, a textbox holding a caption, or a plain shape used as a legend key.

This page documents those gestures once and calls out the places where a particular kind of object behaves differently. If you are looking for the freestyle pen and pencil tools instead, see Whiteboarding.

The four kinds of canvas object 🔗

Shapes, sections and textboxes are annotations, and Kanvas keeps them distinct from the infrastructure in a design. They carry no configuration to deploy, they are left out of the design’s component count, and the Layers panel can hide or reveal all of them as one group. Annotating a design therefore carries no risk to the infrastructure that design describes.

Adding objects to the canvas 🔗

Adding shapes 🔗

Open the shapes tool in the dock. Kanvas presents its shape libraries: Amazon Web Services, Azure Architecture, Dev Icons, Google Cloud Platform, Arrows, Flowchart, Shapes and Simple Line Icons. Search across all of them from the box at the top, or drill into one library at a time.

Drill into a library to browse its contents. The built-in Shapes library alone carries 66 primitives - Actor, Barrel, Bevel, Card, Circle, Cloud, Cone, Corner, Crescent, Cross, Cube, Diamond, Explosion, Flash, HalfFrame, Heptagon, Hexagon and more.

Drag a shape from the picker onto the canvas to place it where you want it. If you find yourself reaching for the same library repeatedly, pin it to the dock - see Pinning a Model to the Dock.

Adding sections 🔗

Drag the section tool from the dock onto the canvas, or press S to drop a section near the center of the canvas.

A new section arrives as an 80-pixel-tall rectangle with a dashed border, a transparent fill and a label rendered along its top edge rather than through its middle - so the region it encloses stays readable. Drag other objects into it and they become children of the section: move the section and they move with it.

Adding textboxes 🔗

Drag the textbox tool from the dock onto the canvas, or press T. The keyboard route places the textbox near the center of the canvas and puts the cursor straight into it, so you can start typing immediately.

A new textbox arrives 60 pixels tall with a dashed gray border and a transparent fill, and its text sits at the top left of the box. To edit the text of an existing textbox - or of any shape, since shapes accept body text too - double-click it.

Selecting and acting on objects 🔗

Context-click (right-click) any object to open its menu. The menu is the same for shapes, sections, textboxes and components; entries that do not apply to the object under the cursor are simply not shown.

Every one of these acts on your whole selection, not just the object under the cursor. To build a selection first, hold Shift or Ctrl/⌘ and drag a selection box across the canvas; Ctrl/⌘ + A selects everything. All of these actions are undoable with Ctrl/⌘ + Z.

Copying 🔗

Copy writes the selected objects to your system clipboard, so you can paste them with Ctrl/⌘ + V into the same design, into a different design, or into a different browser tab running Kanvas. Pasted objects land at your cursor.

Copy carries the object’s styling with it. A shape you have recolored, re-bordered and captioned arrives in the target design looking exactly as it did in the source.

Cloning 🔗

Duplicate - “clone” in the permission model - skips the clipboard and drops a copy straight into the current design, offset 50 pixels right and 50 pixels down from the original so the two do not sit on top of each other. The clone gets fresh identifiers; relationships drawn between members of the cloned selection are cloned along with it, so duplicating a section and its children reproduces the whole arrangement intact.

Use Duplicate when you want another one here, and Copy when you want one somewhere else.

Locking and unlocking 🔗

Locking an object fixes its position on the canvas. A locked object can still be selected, inspected, styled and deleted - what it cannot do is move, whether you drag it directly or drag a selection box across it. Unlock it from the same menu to release it.

Lock state is stored on the object and saved with the design, so it survives a reload and is visible to your collaborators. It is the cheapest way to protect a finished layout from an accidental nudge during a review.

Deleting 🔗

Delete removes the selected objects from the design. Pressing Delete or Backspace does the same thing to whatever is currently selected.

Deleting a section deletes the section itself, not the objects inside it. If you want the contents gone too, select them along with the section before you delete.

Configuring styles 🔗

Select any object and Kanvas floats a style toolbar above it. The toolbar is where every visual property of the object lives:

• Shape - swap the object’s outline for any of the primitives in the shape switcher.
• Background - fill color from the editor palette, plus an opacity slider from 0 to 1.
• Border - color, thickness (0-25) and style: solid, dotted, dashed or double.
• Layer order - push the object forward or back through the stack.
• Name - the label drawn with the object.
• Link - an external URL the object points at.
• Image - a background image, supplied by URL.
• Text - font size, weight, color, decoration, and horizontal and vertical alignment for the object’s body text.
• Animation - none, blink, ripple, bounce or pulse.

With more than one object selected, a change made in the toolbar applies to every object in the selection. That is the fastest way to bring a whole region of a design onto one palette.

Per-object differences 🔗

The toolbar adapts to what the object can actually do, so the controls you see depend on what you have selected.

Sections deliberately carry no body text: a section is a frame, and its identity is the label along its top edge. If you want prose inside a region, put a textbox in it.

Resetting styles 🔗

Reset styles, in the object’s context menu, re-applies the styling recorded in the object’s model definition - shape, colors, border, dimensions, background image and text styling - throwing away every change you made in the style toolbar.

Reset works from the definition, not from an edit history, so it is not an undo: it returns the object to the way that kind of object looks when it is first placed, no matter how many rounds of styling it has been through. The object’s position, its lock state, its configuration and its relationships are untouched.

This is the fast way out of a styling experiment that went wrong, and the fast way to bring one object back into line with the rest of a design.

Resizing 🔗

Select a single object and Kanvas draws a bounding box with eight handles around it - one at each corner and one at the midpoint of each edge.

• Drag a corner handle to resize in both axes at once.
• Drag an edge handle to resize in one axis only.
• Hold Shift while dragging to preserve the object’s aspect ratio.

The new dimensions are stored on the object and saved with the design. Empty sections and textboxes are resized exactly the same way - grow a textbox to fit a longer caption, or a section before you start filling it.

Permission reference 🔗

Each gesture on this page is governed by its own permission in Layer5 Cloud. Organization administrators grant them through keychains and roles; see Keychains and Roles. Where a permission is withheld, the corresponding control simply does not appear on the canvas.

Related reading 🔗

• Whiteboarding - the pen and pencil tools, and line styling.
• Understanding Tool Modes - selection, pan and connector modes.
• Keyboard Shortcuts - the full shortcut reference.
• Working with Components - configuring the components you place.
• Reviewing Designs - comments, which are annotations with their own lifecycle.

Related Reading

• Canvas Actions
• Cloning a Design
• Configuring Components
• Creating Relationships
• Deleting a Design
• Deploying Designs

Related Videos

Publishing Designs

Design Review Mechanics

Design Reviews in Kanvas

Design Reviews: Adding Comments

Kanvas Designer Overview

Pinning Models to Dock

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