Components

We Want You To Contribute!

Canvas is Workday’s central design system and we regularly release centralized code, assets, components, patterns and guidelines for product teams to use. At the same time, we need people working on product teams to contribute their app-level knowledge and solutions back into the central design system, so that our releases are designed with both system and real-world product needs included.

In design system terminology this is called a Hybrid system; which is a combination of Central system content (tools and artifacts created by the central design system team and released to product teams) + Federated system content (tools and artifacts created by product teams and contributed back to the central design system). This is considered to be the most robust design system model for scaling growth, adoption and cohesion across products, and ultimately for making things easier for everyone making design decisions. Visually a Hybrid system model looks something like this:

Understanding Canvas Contribution

There are various ways to contribute to Canvas, but contribution broadly falls into the areas of:

• Code
• Assets
• Components
• Patterns
• Guidelines

Code, Asset, Component and Product Example contribution will typically be in the form of tactical solutions and documentation that you and your team have either already created and want to share for others to use, or solutions that your team would like to Canvas to release and that you and your team want to collaborate with us on creating.

Pattern and Guideline contribution will typically be in the form of design guidance and information that provides a best practice design point-of-view for others to apply.

The contribution workflow is not a one-size-fits-all process. Some forms of contribution, such as Product Examples, are a light lift for the contributor; conversely, writing a Guideline article can be a lengthy process with several incremental quality checks along the way. Ultimately, Canvas wants to make the contribution process as streamlined and easy as possible, whatever it is you’re contributing. That’s why in this section you’ll find self-guided templates, how-to videos, FAQs and support contacts. We understand the importance of federated contribution and want to make it as exciting and barrier free as possible for you to do.

Fill out the Component Contribution Form to kick off the process!

Types of Contributions

Tokens

As the core foundations of Canvas, additions and enhancements to Tokens are rare but extremely important. If there’s Token that doesn’t work for your team or you’re interested in adding to or evolving token library, contact #canvas Slack channel. It’s a conversation we’d love to have.

To learn more about Tokens in detail, visit the Canvas Tokens page.

Components

Canvas Components are universally reusable building blocks like buttons, input fields, status indicators, modals, etc. These are built and maintained by the Canvas team. If your new component is a good candidate for universal use we’d like to hear from you.

Similar to Assets, if you’d like to contribute a component to Canvas you should be sure to review our Component Library to familiarize yourself with our existing components. Once you’ve done so, head over to the contribution form and submit a request for the component you’d like to contribute. You’ll be contacted by a member of the Canvas team once we’ve triaged the contribution request and we can begin the process.

Most contributions will follow our component contribution model: Discover, Define, Design, Deliver. We break this process down for you in detail in the Component Contribution Process section of this page.

Benefits of Contribution

Our mission at Canvas is to enable fast, sustainable design and development of unified user experiences. In order to get there as a lean team, we depend on frequent collaboration and contribution from product teams to ensure the design system meets their needs. More importantly, they’re the ones defining the user experiences for your products, and have deep understanding of their users like no other. This knowledge is invaluable when it comes to evolving the design system. Contributing to Canvas offers a world of benefits:

Getting Started

In order for Canvas to be a living, evolving system that represents all of our product organization, we need community participation. Contributing components to Canvas is a means to connect your product area expertise to improving outcomes for users across all of Workday.

When you or your team identifies a component that you want to contribute, be sure to review the Canvas Kit Storybook and the Canvas Component Library to ensure that your component (or something similar to it) doesn’t currently exist in the system. You may find an existing option that can meet your requirements or satisfy your use case.

The Component Contribution Process

Enhancements to our components or the creation of a new component involve collaboration between product teams and Canvas. No two contributions will be the same, and while some can be completed in few hours, others may require a longer-term committment to discovery, design explorations, implementation, and documentation.

If you’re interested in contributing to Canvas Components, use the Component Contribution Form to inform the Canvas team of the component that you would like to contribute. Questions? Let us know in the #canvas slack channel or contact anyone from the Canvas team directly.