One canvas, many deliverables

Shyne has one visual document: the canvas. Presentation, document, carousel, social, and video are ways of working and ways of exporting. They are not five different file formats you have to migrate between.

That sentence is the whole product model, if you sit with it. Most creative suites grew up as a stack of file types. A slide file is not a page file. A page file is not a video project. An agent that wants to turn a deck into a film has to leave one schema and invent another. People do the same thing by hand, usually on a Friday, usually badly.

Shyne refuses that split. If you can see it, it can live on a canvas. If it needs a bound, it is a frame. If it needs an order or a clock, it is a sequence. Everything else is an output profile.

The pieces that matter

A project is the place work lives — access, files, and one or more canvases. A canvas is the infinite workspace. Inside it you will find:

• Nodes, the editable pieces of content
• Groups, when those pieces need to travel together
• Frames, the bounded regions you render, present, or export
• Sequences, ordered or timed collections of frames

A frame can sit loose on the canvas or belong to a sequence. A sequence keeps a stable identity when you reorder it, publish it, or export it. Frame ids and sequence ids stay stable across edits, moves, migration, publishing, and export. That stability is what lets a scheduled post, an export job, and a collaborator’s comment keep pointing at the same thing.

A project may own several canvases. A canvas may contain loose nodes, loose frames, and several sequences at once. A frame belongs to zero or one sequence. Moving one sequence member to another canvas detaches it and keeps its visual position. Moving a whole sequence moves the sequence, its frames, and their nodes together. Cross-canvas moves preserve every id or refuse before writing. They never silently remap identity.

Those rules sound strict because they are. Identity is the difference between “the third slide” as a casual phrase and “this frame” as something an agent, a renderer, and a publish target can all name.

Why this shape

If a slide, a page, and a social post are different documents, an agent has to rewrite the work every time the format changes. If they are frames on one canvas, the same brand, the same files, and the same teammate can move across them.

You can keep a research board, a twelve-frame deck, and a three-scene film in the same project. Each sequence is its own deliverable. The canvas is the place they stay related. The moodboard is not a different product. It is loose frames and nodes. The deck is not a different product. It is an ordered sequence. The film is not a different product. It is a timed sequence.

HTML is not the ordinary edit representation. It is how work arrives from the outside and how work leaves when you ask for HTML. Import is normalized into nodes once. The import source is discarded. Output HTML is compiled from the current graph and is never written back as creative truth. PNG, PDF, PowerPoint, and MP4 are the same idea: compile the graph you have, do not invent a second document.

Start with the thing you want to make

Pick a structure that matches the job.

If you are making a poster, a social post, a cover, or a standalone visual, use a loose frame on a canvas. One bound, one export, no obligation to put it in a sequence until you need one.

If you are making a presentation, a carousel, a report, or a visual document, use an ordered sequence of frames. Order is the point. Rank is explicit. You can reorder without renaming a pile of files.

If you are making a video, a reel, or an animated clip, use a timed sequence. The frames are still frames. Playback, duration, picture tracks, and audio tracks attach to that structure.

You can also start from a template and let the teammate fill it. Templates apply into the same graph. They are not a side format that later has to be “converted into Shyne.”

Be specific about the audience and the length. “A nine-slide investor update for existing angels” gives the teammate a sequence to build. “Make a deck” gives it a blank permission slip.

How addressing works

Every canvas-bound action names a project and a canvas. An explicit valid canvas wins. Omission is accepted only when the project contains exactly one canvas. Zero canvases, or several canvases without a target, returns an error that names the available ids. Reads never create a canvas. Mutations never fall back to a project-level “current” document or a magic main target.

This is the part people trip on when they first connect an external agent. The agent says no canvas was specified. That is correct behavior. List canvases, pick one, then write. If you pin a canvas and that canvas disappears while work is suspended, the operation fails. It does not quietly continue on whatever is left.

A durable external reference is the tuple of project, canvas, kind, and source id. Comments, exports, and pending uploads keep the canvas they started on. That is how a render started on the launch sequence does not finish by stamping a thumbnail onto the research board.

Sequences are first-class

A sequence is not a tag on a frame. It has its own id, its own origin, frame size, gap, playback, and optional timeline state. Membership lives on the frame as a placement: which sequence, which rank. At most one owner converges naturally because placement is one value. If a sequence goes missing, the frames become loose. Content is not hidden or deleted as an orphan.

That last rule matters more than it sounds. Creative tools love to punish incomplete state. Shyne treats a missing owner as a loose frame you can still see. You can reattach it. You cannot lose the work because a pointer went stale.

Member labels are sequence-level. In context a frame may be called a slide, a page, a scene, or a post. Those are names for the job in front of you. Artboard is not a product noun. We retired it on purpose. If you bring that word from another tool, the canvas will still understand the frame.

What stays on the canvas when you move

Notes, theme overrides, and interactions travel with the frame or sequence that owns them. Canvas-local ids never key project-level side tables that would be left behind. If you move a sequenced film to another canvas, you are not hoping a second database row notices. The record moves with the work.

One user gesture is one transaction and one undo step. Bake, reparent, and demote belong together when they are one decision. That is an editor rule and an agent rule. A teammate that splits one change across three writes is harder to undo than a teammate that does the whole gesture at once.

Several deliverables, one theme

A canvas can hold a brand study, a sales sequence, and a hiring one-pager without pretending they are the same artifact. They share the project theme and the file library. They do not share a forced page size unless you put them in a sequence that has one.

This is how a consultant actually works. The leave-behind and the verbal deck are related. The social cut-down is related. The two-minute recap is related. Related is not “same file.” Related is “same project, same brand, same teammate, different sequences.”

When you export, you choose what to compile. A single frame. A whole sequence. Options depend on the selection. You are not exporting “the Shyne file.” You are compiling the region you mean.

Formats are outputs

Presentation, document, carousel, social, email, and video describe how work is arranged or exported. They do not create separate storage models. If we ever add another output, it will read the same graph. It will not ask you to duplicate the campaign into a new document type.

That is the test we use internally. If a feature needs a second source of truth, it is not ready. If it can be a frame, a sequence, or a compile step, it can ship.

A working picture

Imagine a launch week. Canvas A holds the narrative sequence: twelve frames, spoken order, speaker notes on the frames that need them. Canvas B, or the same canvas if you prefer the mess, holds a three-frame social cut and a timed fifteen-second bumper. The logo lives in the project files. The theme already has the green and the gold. The teammate writes the first pass of all three. You throw away four slides, tighten the bumper, and publish the social cut from Share after you inspect the preview.

Nothing in that week required a new kind of document. It required a canvas that can hold more than one deliverable, and a teammate that can see all of them.

Start with the thing you want to make. Give it a sequence if it needs an order. Leave it loose if it does not. Export the graph when someone outside Shyne needs a file. Keep the canvas when you still have work to do.