Guidelines

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.

Getting Started

In order for Canvas to be a living, evolving hybrid design system that represents all of our product organization, we need community participation. Contributing pattern knowledge to Canvas is a way to connect your product area expertise improving outcomes for users across all of Workday. When you or your team identifies a guideline that you consider should be contributed, be sure to review Canvas Guidelines to ensure that your guideline doesn’t currently exist in the system. Also check out Canvas Patterns for any potential information crossover with the guideline you plan to write. If you find this is the case you may have additional knowledge to contribute to a guideline or pattern pattern, in which case it will be treated as an update rather than new documentation.

The Quality Check Process

The time it takes to document a pattern will vary depending on the complexity of the subject matter and the number of collaborators involved. In order to ensure that each new pattern meets a quality standard in keeping with existing Canvas documentation, the Canvas team has implemented a quality check process for all pattern contributors to follow. This is outlined below:

FAQs & Support

FAQs for contributors are an ongoing work in progress. We will continually update and scale these FAQs as Federated Contribution to the design system increases. For now you can view existing FAQs here: