One Canvas, Four Modes: How We Added Slides and Design Without Splitting the Product

The Question That Started It

"You know how Figma lets you build a series of slides on a canvas. How hard would that be for us?"

The honest first answer was: adding a slide feature is not hard. Adding it well is hard, because our toolbar was already crowded and slides would become one more button lost among thirty others.

That reframed the problem. The question was not "how do we add slides." It was "how do we let one canvas serve four genuinely different jobs without becoming unusable at all four."

The Principle

We landed on one rule that decided every subsequent design question:

> Modes are lenses over the same canvas, not different document types.

A user can switch modes at any time, on any note, without converting, exporting, or losing anything.

This is a stronger constraint than it sounds. It rules out the obvious implementation — a slide deck as a distinct document kind with its own storage and editor — which is what most products do and which produces the familiar misery of "this is a whiteboard, you cannot put slides in it, please create a new file."

The four modes, mapped to what a person is actually doing:

Read down the first column: Capture, Think, Present, Polish. That is one workflow, not four products. Take meeting notes, spatially organize them, turn the good ideas into slides, polish a diagram for the deck — without copying anything anywhere.

The Hard Part Is the Negative Space

Most of the design work went into specifying what switching modes must never do. Every one of these was a real bug risk:

• Never duplicate, convert, hide, or delete content. If you switch to Slides and your loose sticky notes vanish because they are not on a frame, the feature is broken. Content outside the current mode's primary abstraction stays visible.
• Never create an undo entry. Mode is a view preference. If switching modes is undoable, then undo after a mode switch does something surprising, and undo is the one interaction that must never surprise anyone.
• Never remount the editor. Remounting the canvas loses viewport, selection, and in-progress edits, and produces a visible flash. The canvas stays mounted; only the surrounding interface changes.
• Never force collaborators into the same mode. Mode is per-user local state. Two people can edit the same scene simultaneously with one in Slides and one in Design. This falls out of storing mode locally rather than in the shared document, and it is the single decision that keeps the feature from fighting with real-time collaboration.
• Never lose position. Each mode remembers its own: Note scroll position, Whiteboard camera, selected slide, Design camera. Switching away and back returns you to where you were, not to origin.

What switching does change: the toolbar, the side panels, the defaults for new objects, camera behavior, and the export options.

Why This Fit Our Existing Architecture

We got lucky, in the sense that a decision made a year earlier turned out to be the right foundation.

Our Focus view already presented the same underlying content as a clean document while leaving the canvas mounted underneath. That is exactly the mode pattern, built once for a different reason. And most of the tools the four modes needed already existed in the toolbar — the work was organizing them, not building them.

That is why the mode framework itself was a small piece of work while Slides and Design were substantial. The framework was mostly making an existing pattern general.

Existing sessions map cleanly: Focus becomes Note mode, Canvas becomes Whiteboard mode. Nobody's habits break.

The Selector

One compact control in the header: Note | Whiteboard | Slides | Design.

• Desktop: a four-part control with icon, label, and a one-line tooltip
• Mobile: shows the current mode; tapping opens a bottom sheet
• Keyboard: Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + 1 through 4
• Every mode and every tool stays reachable from the command palette
• Mode is remembered per user, per note
• New blank notes start in Note mode; templates can recommend otherwise — Meeting Notes opens in Note, Brainstorm opens in Whiteboard, Pitch Deck opens in Slides

The Naming Decision

We nearly called the fourth mode "Designer." We did not, and the reasoning generalizes.

"Designer" implies Figma: full layers, components, constraints, auto-layout, prototyping, shared libraries. If we ship a mode called Designer and it has artboards and an inspector but no components, every designer who tries it concludes the feature is half-built — even if what is there works well.

A name sets an expectation, and an expectation you cannot meet turns a good feature into a disappointing one. We shipped Design mode with a scope we could actually deliver: artboards, layers, a geometry and style inspector, alignment, distribution, z-order, presets, and PNG/SVG/PDF export. Real, useful, and not pretending to be Figma.

The same logic applied to Slides. It is called Slides, not Presentations, and it does what the word promises: frames, thumbnails, reordering, speaker notes, presentation mode, and export.

The Rollout

We staged it deliberately:

1. Introduce the mode selector and reorganize existing tools into Note and Whiteboard
2. Confirm switching feels natural and does not confuse anyone
3. Build Slides on the existing frames foundation
4. Add Design only once we could genuinely support it

Step two matters. If the mode concept itself is confusing, adding two more modes multiplies the confusion. Better to find that out with the two modes people already had.

The Result

Four modes over one persistent canvas. Frames tagged as slides, artboards, or sections. Per-user, per-note mode preference and viewport. Collaboration, encryption, templates, responsive layouts, accessibility, and legacy-note migration all integrated rather than bolted on.

The broader lesson, if there is one: when a product needs to do several different jobs, the choice between one flexible tool and several specialized ones is usually a false choice. One powerful substrate with progressive disclosure gets you both, and the engineering discipline it demands is almost entirely in what you refuse to let the mode switch touch.

Open a canvas and try switching modes — no account required.

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