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Cortex Design refuses in plain sentences rather than in codes, so the message you are looking at is usually the answer. This page lists the message or the state you see, what caused it, and what to do about it, grouped by the part of Design you were in when it happened. One piece of orientation explains a good share of the confusion. Design has two surfaces: a CANVASES rail beside a Chat thread or a Code session, which lists and creates canvases, and the Cortex Design window, which edits them. There is no Design page in the browser, so if you are hunting for the editor there, that is why you cannot find it. See Cortex Design for the map.

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Signing in and access

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The canvas cap

Making room needs one detail. Deleting a design hides it: its versions and images stay so it can come back, and a hidden canvas is still yours, so it still occupies one of the 200. If you are at the cap, permanently delete a hidden canvas rather than only hiding another one.
200 canvases per account is the only cap on how many designs you can have. There is no daily allowance, no monthly allowance and no separate per-plan figure for Design, so a refusal at this point is about the total you hold, not about something resetting later.

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A save that was refused

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An image that was refused

See Export a design for the thumbnail a canvas carries and what export produces.

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An option that did not finish

When Cortex answers a brief with several options and one of them stops, the rest of the board is unaffected. The frame that could not finish shows Failed and its card explains in words why the attempt stopped.
1

Read the card

It names the option and the reason. Nothing else on the canvas is rolled back.
2

Retry just that option

Use the retry control on the frame card, or the matching retry in the thread. It reruns that option only.
3

Or remove the frame

Remove frame drops the failed option and keeps the rest of the canvas.
Until you do one or the other, the whole canvas reports its state as failed. That is deliberate: a failed piece outranks a piece that is still being drawn, which outranks a finished one, so the canvas tells you about the worst thing on it rather than the newest.
A board that looks stuck is sometimes a board between refreshes. The editor’s pills use the word Streaming while a change lands, but Design refreshes canvas state rather than receiving a live push, so give it a moment, or reopen the canvas, before treating it as failed.

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When Cortex cannot be reached

The Design window is built to say so rather than to look empty. While you are offline, canvases you already have open stay readable from the copy on your machine, and edits queue and sync when the connection returns. If the window will not get past this state, there is no Design-specific recovery step beyond retrying: check Status or status.cortex.foundation for an incident, then see Troubleshooting for the guidance that applies to every Cortex application.

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A control you cannot find

Comments, sharing and the numeric tweak control are not available in Cortex Design today.
There is no comment surface on a canvas, and no way to resolve or reply to one. Leave a note on the board instead: notes are part of the canvas, they are saved into the version history with everything else, and Cortex reads them. See Design canvases.
Editing a generated frame by its numbers is not available yet. Ask for the change in the editor thread instead, naming the frame, and Cortex redraws it. See Generate and edit.
There is no queue and no status board to look at. The Bot jobs row, the Hand to Bot button in the editor header and the Hand to a Bot sheet are drawn, but nothing runs behind them, and a Cortex Bot cannot open or change a design canvas today. See Bot jobs.
They are separate stores that share a word. The Design library holds components, tokens and pages you reuse on canvases; the Chat Library is a file store. See Design library.

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Error codes used by Design

The full catalogue is at Problems.