Canvas App Design Ideas – In this blog post, you’ll learn four approaches to branding a Canvas app. I also provide resources that will save you tons of time working on big projects.
When you’re starting with a blank canvas app, it’s tempting to start creating elements and screens first and leave branding behind. Color, font and style perfection. In fact, the opposite is more effective.
Canvas App Design Ideas
If you design elements when you add them to your screen, you can copy them when you need other elements. This method will not help you if the customer wants to change the font, base color or style of the buttons.
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It works well for small applications with a limited budget and few components. You create a screen called “Branding” and add the elements you need. Apply on-screen branding and style elements.
Then when I add screens and elements, I refer to the branding screen element style in the new elements. For example, all buttons on all screens will have attributes that reference the style from the branded screen button;
If I change the style of a button on the branding screen, the style for all other buttons will also change.
I used this approach when branding an app used to read QR codes while checking in event attendees.
Canvas Creator (ui/ux, App Design)
Sancho Harker (@iAm_ManCat) created a solution that uses the previous three methods to save us a lot of time: he created a branding template for the Canvas app.
Important: You cannot apply this to existing applications, you must use this template from scratch.
This method allows you to define a theme for the app that goes deep into your app structure, and every new component you add will be automatically themed—always.
After opening the file, click “Apps” at the top of the loading screen and select the “OnStart” feature. Expand the Function Editor window and scroll down to Theme Variables. Changes you make here will apply to all items you add to the app
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I use these four methods when building canvas apps. Choose the method that fits the size of your project and matches your skills.
User experience through digital interface, interaction, branding and visual design has been his passion and focus since creating his first website at the age of 14. He is a Solution Architect at Power Platform specializing in Power Apps Portal. She was named Business Application MVP and one of Norway’s top 50 women in technology in 2022. Currently working as Low Code Practice Lead at Itera. If you want to become more efficient at building apps, no-code/low-code is a great place to start. Microsoft has even added some new features that make app creation even faster.
Microsoft has added some new functionality to Power Apps that lets you create Canvas apps from a sketch or diagram as well as a Figma design file.
This new feature provides two huge benefits. The first, and perhaps most obvious, is that Power Apps can create screens for your application from a drawing or design. It just saves time. Another big win here is time savings and beautiful end results when you have a UX/UI design team and you have to build an app based on their ideas.
Overview Of Building Canvas Apps
In this article, I am going to focus on building an app from Figma as it is the most important for app building organizations and teams.
First, we’ll show you how to build the app, and then we’ll share some of our thoughts on the process.
Microsoft has put together a Figma UI Kit to get you started with Figma here. We sent it to our favorite UX designer, Josh Everingham, to create a simple concept for a hair salon scheduling app designed for mobile and make it look good.
The template comes with some guidelines to help you decide which elements can be used and which features are supported.
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It’s not just a gray application with text and buttons. He spent some time creating some custom graphics, color selection and an intuitive user experience. He operationalized this design, meaning he could share the idea with stakeholders, touch, click and feel the app from Welcome to Cut Approved before it was actually built.
OK, so now let’s see what it’s like to build a canvas app from Josh’s idea. The first thing I’ll say is that Figma isn’t my country, so I’ve got a bit of a learning curve there, and here’s what I found.
First, if you don’t have edit rights to the Figma design file, you can only copy references to specific frames of the design. This will basically give you a single page canvas application. This works, but is not a desirable goal if you have multiple frames on a figma page, or in our case an entire application concept.
So you can either ask your designer for permission to edit, or in my case I copied the design file into my projects and then used that file to create.
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With proper permission, you can copy the page link and then you will get all the frames for your design. Each frame in your canvas application is created as a separate screen.
Another thing I noticed is that the screens are created in the same order as defined on your figma page. By order I don’t mean the arrangement or flow of ideas, I mean the order in which they appear in the list of frames in Figma’s Layers panel. So if you have a landing screen that you want users to see first, place it at the top of your figma page.
Canvas Apps Advice. Note that by default, the PowerApps start screen is always the top screen, unless you specify one in the App object’s StartScreen property.
After building the app, we still have work to do to make the app functional. Some of these things can be solved by tweaking the design file. Others are things you need to enable or configure in your application.
My New Haul… I’m Open To Suggestions For Setup Ideas.
Our app has a back button in the top left corner. When created in the Canvas app, we found that this button was created with very large left and right tabs, causing the text to get cut off. Just adjusting this staffing was a simple solution. Without digging too much, I suspect it’s some sort of translation issue. The button padding is identical to Figma’s left and right padding sets, so there are obviously some scale differences.
If you’re familiar with building canvas apps, you know that each control has a set color or fill property. In this case, button controls are created and their fill is set to red. However, all “secondary” or action colors are set by default. So when you hover or click the button we get a different color which is not what the designer intended. In our case, the design is just called red, no other behavior.
No, not really. Figma offers you different types of rolling containers: forms and containers. None of these great options translate directly to the gallery controls we use in Canvas apps In our concept, we have several screens that provide a list of choices. In the Canvas app world, these are best done with gallery controls, so this is one area where we just need to remove the built-in controls and replace them with what we need.
Productivity tip/thought. Every time you need to rebuild the screen like this, it would be better if we define our look and feel for the app. This is where starting with an app theme template will be helpful. Of course, the key to making this work is keeping your theme template in sync with your figma design. I’m wondering what it would take to create a “rebuild/rebuild/shape/screen content” canvas app from figma with theme templates.
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So now we know there will be some screens that need to be reworked, content needs to be recreated so that the app works. I think it’s something you have to plan for.
This may seem obvious, but it’s definitely worth mentioning. If your idea has some kind of data model aspect, you need to implement it. Whether it involves lists of data from SharePoint, Dataverse, or elsewhere, you’ll need those entities and connect your galleries and forms to connect to them. This is probably the most labor intensive part of the entire process.
Recommendation: Follow up with your designer or design team to plan your data model so it’s ready when you build your app.
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