canvas-design

An agent skill by anthropics, from anthropics/skills. Tags: anthropic, design, documents, generative, visual-art.

What it does

Create beautiful visual art in .png and .pdf documents using design philosophy. You should use this skill when the user asks to create a poster, piece of art, design, or other static piece. Create original visual designs, never copying existing artists' work to avoid copyright violations.

Install

With the skills CLI, which installs into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other agents:

npx skills add anthropics/skills --skill canvas-design

Or copy the skill folder into Claude Code's skills directory by hand (~/.claude/skills for every project, or .claude/skills inside one):

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/anthropics/skills
cp -r skills/skills/canvas-design ~/.claude/skills/canvas-design

Safety box score

Grade B, low risk: 23 of 100 risk points, rated 2026-09-20. The grade rates what the skill and its scripts can reach on the machine of whoever installs it, across eight categories from shell execution to secrets access. How the score works.

This skill is a design-only workflow that creates one-page visual art and a short philosophy file, with local font assets bundled in the repo. The main risks are network access from the instruction to download fonts if needed, and opacity from the many unreadable binary font files used to generate the final artifact.

Category levels, from 0 (none) to 3 (high)
Category	Level	Why
Code & shell execution	0 (none)	No scripts or code are shipped; the skill is only Markdown instructions plus font files.
Network access	2 (moderate)	It explicitly says to "Download and use whatever fonts are needed," which can cause outbound fetching from unspecified sources.
Filesystem reach	1 (low)	Its normal output is limited to " .md files, .pdf files, and .png files" and the bundled fonts live under `canvas-fonts/`, so file impact is mostly workspace-scoped.
Secrets & credentials	0 (none)	The skill does not ask for API keys, passwords, dotfiles, browser sessions, or other secrets.
Privilege & persistence	0 (none)	It does not request sudo, global installs, services, shell startup edits, or OS-level changes.
Instruction hijack surface	1 (low)	The text contains strong directive language like "CRITICAL" and "IMPORTANT," but it does not tell the agent to ignore higher-priority instructions or fetch outside prompts.
Irreversible actions	0 (none)	It only creates local art files; it does not publish, send, deploy, pay, or delete anything.
Transparency	2 (moderate)	The repo includes many unreadable `.ttf` binaries in `canvas-fonts/`, so part of the asset set cannot be reviewed directly.

Before installing

Check whether your agent has permission to reach the network for font downloads, or disable that path and rely only on `canvas-fonts/`.
Open `SKILL.md` and confirm the output stays in the workspace and does not write to dotfiles or system paths.
If you care about supply chain control, replace the "download" instruction with a pinned, local font set before using it.

Rated 2026-09-20 by an automated review of 29 files from the skill's repository.

Source

Repository: anthropics/skills (all skills from this repository)
Path: skills/canvas-design/SKILL.md
Branch: main
Updated: 2026-09-19

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