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Cortex Design is where visual work lives. The unit of work is a design canvas: a board that holds frames, notes, images and pieces you reuse from your Design library. A canvas is created from, and stays linked to, one thread, either a Cortex Chat conversation or a Cortex Code session. Ask Cortex for a layout in that thread and it draws frames on the canvas beside it. Design has exactly two surfaces. In the web app, a CANVASES rail sits beside a Chat thread or a Code session and lists the canvases that thread produced. The working editor is the Cortex Design desktop app, a separate window with its own gallery, editor, library and settings. This page is the map of the whole area.

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Explore Design

Design quickstart

From an empty gallery to a saved version and an export, in a few minutes.

Design canvases

What a canvas holds, its host thread, the rail, the gallery, renaming and deleting.

Generate and edit

Generate options, pick one, ask for a change on a frame, retry an option that failed.

Versions

Every save is a version. View an older one, or restore it as a new version.

Design library

Components, tokens and pages you reuse across canvases, shared by your whole account.

Export a design

A rendered PNG and the canvas document as JSON. SVG and PDF are planned.

Bot jobs

Handing a design brief to a Cortex Bot is planned. It is not available yet.

Design connectors

The Plugins page in the Design window, and which connectors reach Design.

Design desktop app

What the window holds, its sidebar, and why there is nothing to install yet.

Design settings

General, Models, and Data and privacy, inside the Design window.

Design troubleshooting

Signed out, a canvas that is not available, the canvas quota, an option that failed.

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Where Design lives

A CANVASES rail is drawn beside an open Chat thread or Code session. It lists only the canvases that belong to the thread you are looking at, with each row’s title, host, time and artifact counts, and a status pill of Idle, In flight, Ready or Failed.The rail is a right-hand column on a wide window, and a collapsed strip under the pane on a narrow one, so the transcript keeps its width until you ask for the rail. From a row you can choose Open in Design when the app can be reached, or Copy reference to copy the canvas id and paste it into the Design window.There is no Design page in the browser, and no Design entry beside Chat, Code and Bot. That is the design of the product, not a gap: the rail creates and lists canvases, and the desktop app edits them.

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How it fits with the other products

A canvas’s host is Chat or Code, never both, and you can move that binding later. Deleting the thread a canvas came from does not delete the canvas: it only leaves the canvas with no thread. Two nearby things share a word with Design and are separate objects. A Chat canvas is a markdown document written beside a conversation, not a board of frames. The Design library is a set of design building blocks, while the Chat Library is a file store. Design canvases has a table that keeps them apart.

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What is not available yet

Cortex Design is honest about its edges. Handing a design to a Bot is planned and does not work today. SVG and PDF export are planned; PNG and JSON ship. There is no comment surface and no publish or share surface: a canvas is private to your account, and someone else’s canvas simply answers as not available. Numeric tweaking of a generated frame is also planned.
An account can keep up to 200 design canvases. That is the only cap on how many designs you can have.