Canvas

What is the Canvas?

The Canvas is Metaflow’s drag-and-drop visual workspace where you sketch the scaffolding of your creative output—before any AI fills it in.

Think of it like a coloring book:

• You define the layout, structure, and zones (text, image, logic).
• Then, LLMs “color it in” with dynamic content—copy, visuals, CTAs, and more.
• The result is coherent, brand-aligned output—multiplied 100x across variations.

You’re not designing a doc. You’re designing a system for documents, banners, assets, pages—templates that think.

Why Use the Canvas?

Use the Canvas when:

• You want structured creative output (e.g., blog banners, ads, landing pages)
• You’re composing documents or templates that need AI to inject content
• You want to scale a pattern, not just generate one-off results
• You need to visually reason about content flow, hierarchy, and dependencies
• You’re mixing content types: text, images, tables, metadata, etc.

The Canvas bridges design thinking and AI operations—letting you build a visual logic for scalable execution.

When to Use the Canvas

Use it to:

• Lay out marketing collateral—ad variants, emails, landing page blocks
• Design modular assets—eBooks, case studies, one-pagers, pitch decks
• Build creative systems—each block item acting as a placeholder for AI content
• Preview and tweak AI-generated layouts before final render

How It Works

The Canvas is a two-part system: first you sketch the structure, then you wire it to dynamic content.

• When you create a new Canvas, you’re defining the layout—adding placeholder text, image blocks, and other components to create clear “zones” (like title, body, hero image, CTA). This becomes your reusable visual scaffold.
• Inside a Flow, you add this layout by inserting a Canvas block and selecting your saved Canvas.
• You then map upstream nodes to the Canvas items:
  • Connect text outputs from LLM blocks (e.g., title, tagline) to corresponding text zones
  • Connect image outputs from upstream image generators or fetchers to image zones
• The result is a live preview, directly in the Canvas. You can:
  • Download the output immediately
  • Chain multiple Canvases together
  • Send the outputs to a final Output node to create a composite or collage

Canvas lets you think in layers: design the bones once, then let intelligent workflows fill in the flesh—hundreds of times over.

Example Use Cases

• A landing page generator scaffolded by messaging blocks, then auto-filled per persona
• A product update doc layout that pulls latest release notes and auto-summarizes
• A one-pager builder with dynamic images, brand copy, and CTAs generated from a product brief
• An ad creative layout that generates 10+ variants with different headlines, images, and tones

Key Capabilities

• Drag-and-drop nodes for layout, logic, and content
• Structured zones for text, image, table, or mixed content
• Reference outputs from other Flows or Agents inside each node
• Generate previews of the full canvas with dynamic AI filling
• Reuse Canvas templates across projects or clients

How It Fits In

• Canvas is your front-end blueprint for creative and content workflows
• Flows can be triggered from the Canvas or feed it with structured data
• Agents can manipulate, reuse, or spawn canvases dynamically
• Records capture filled-out canvases for export or downstream use
• Content Editor powers the prompt templates behind each node