bsdc canvas:Marketing:Production:

If you don’t, people will look elsewhere.

I’m not speaking here of the social media or internet marketing platforms. I am speaking of the bsdc canvas, a simple desktop application that lets you paint digital canvases on a single piece of hardware.

If you have never heard of it before, it is probably because the idea has been around for longer than most people can remember — but if you are one of those few people who do, you have likely seen results from its usage.

The platform itself is very simple to use; it’s a browser extension that lets you create new canvases, brush on your favorite colors and then save them as images (or share them with other people using the platform) to be viewed on any screen. The idea was originally created for artists by Reuben Burdick and Daniel Ackermann in their “creative economy” laboratory at MIT. It was then picked up by John Carmack (with whom both Burdick and Ackermann were close friends) and two other engineers who later went on to form Id Software. Carmack was given creative control over its development and he made significant improvements to the software over time; this led to an eventual release under his name in 2006 (it was known as “bsdcanvas” at that point). It became a commercial product in 2010 under the name “bsdcanvas Pro” and has since been licensed and distributed widely.

The web-based version is available under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0, while the desktop version is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The bsdc canvas was originally designed as an alternative to traditional paint programs such as Photoshop, but has since evolved into a tool that can be used much like any other desktop application: it can be opened in any browser, dragged onto your desktop or laptop screen, and dragged around with your mouse — although being dragged by hand is not possible (like dragging an image across a piece of paper). You can also create thumbnails so that you can create selections from larger pieces of artwork instead of having to paint each individual piece individually. The canvas allows you to modify colors and brush strokes freely; however, there are limits on what you can do with brushes: for instance, if you want to make changes to multiple colors at once, you will get back only one color per stroke regardless of how many strokes are actually used when creating that selection — so it isn’t really much

“Production” is the term I like to use for the process of creating an app, in contrast to “first product.” While it is (in theory) very similar to “first product” in that it is a way of creating an app, and while it can be considered a necessary step, it’s also not the end of the process. I believe that once you have created, tested, and iterated on your first version of your app, the next step is one of refinement. You need to make changes based on feedback from users, test those changes and then refine them further. What happens here is that you begin iterating again until you have reached a point where you have enough confidence in what works and what doesn’t work that you can start a new iteration based on whatever has worked well so far.

I think this is a very important part of what keeps me excited about software development: as programmers, we are trained to keep iterating — and not only because “we can do it better!” But because we are using our skills to build something which will ultimately improve lives for people all over the world.

So don’t get too hung up on production as “the endpoint”. Get excited about improving your workflow each time you release an update (or even if your app just gets released!). Focus more on refining the way things work rather than thinking about how many features or languages you have developed.

BSDCan canvas is a great way to present your product. In fact, it is the best way to present your product. Let me explain.

I’m not a “designer” in the traditional sense, I’m more of an evangelist for design and illustration and I have been since the earliest days of my work with Adobe Photoshop. For years, I have been collaborating with various designers (often who are not designers) to create creative visualizations of our products which appear on web pages or in print publications, or on the back covers of books and magazines. The most successful ones tend to be those which are simple enough that they don’t require advanced design skills to pull off well.

In those cases, we just need to make sure that our imagery looks good (and communicates what we want). But there are times when the visuals don’t quite match the message. We have a simple rule at BSDCan: if we can say something about our product that is even half as good or better in as few words as possible, we will go ahead and build it.

So what does a bsdc canvas look like? The result depends on our approach, but it can be summarized as making content — whether text or images — that is:

• well-formatted (it should be easy for people to scan across a page)

• easy enough for printers and editors to follow through with quality work

• easy enough for people who aren’t designers — such as you — to read and understand (and thus add value by using your product).

The idea behind this approach is that you want people who aren’t designers and marketers (such as your target audience) to use your product without having any idea what you think they need or want from it. And so you make your content look like something they could use without having bothered to read past the first paragraph or two of its description. In this way you deliver some value without having spent money on creating it yourself; instead, you rely solely on other people doing it well enough for us all! This method works well because it satisfies three core needs: • The need for information at an easy-to-read level

• The need for visualization at an easy-to-understand level

• The need for accessibility at an easy-to-use level

Back in the early 2000s, a small group of us at bsdc got together to talk about how we could build a website that would be useful for large organizations (such as hospitals) that had not traditionally used websites. It was a long effort, and none of us were very good with HTML or web design (or even computer science). When we started it, my friend Matan Gaon came up with the idea of “canvas”. canvas is a tool that allows you to draw shapes on the web with JavaScript (rather than HTML). It also allowed me to think about what it would be like to build a website for a large organization. So, when I visited Matan’s office about two years later, he showed me the sketch of his new project: bsdc canvas (the name is a pun on the word “big studio”).

Here are some screenshots from when we started – I don’t remember how many people were involved:

Since then, I have been working on this small portion of bsdc canvas – adding functionality and improving it over time.

The prototype was so small that my friend Luke Barrington had to do all the work himself (which saved him lots of money), and we decided not to release it in its current form until we had built up enough features so that people would use it day-to-day.[1] Our current version is roughly 2 MB in size; it has been downloaded over 100 times and shown hundreds of times over.

[1] The designers behind bsdc canvas did not want us to release the site itself but wanted us instead to focus our efforts on making it easy for users to use — which meant building out additional functionality and supporting multiple browsers. We did build out some functionality but ultimately decided this wasn’t enough — especially because most users didn’t need additional functionality beyond what was already available via plugins.[2] Eventually, we gave up trying to support multiple browsers and focused instead on simplifying the experience for users who don’t have scripting experience.[3] This turned out to be less difficult than planned; one thing that took two years was learning how much more complicated things are in CSS than they are in JavaScript, especially when you start using things like CSS animations.[4]

[2] In 2008, Mozilla released its mobile

In this post, I asked for your input on a question that is often asked and is an important one: what do you think of the functionalities proposed by bsdc canvas?

There are many ways to approach this, but I’d like to suggest a few options.

If you have any other suggestions, let me know in the comments. 🙂