Canvas v4 was the fourth design my partner produced, iterating back and forth with his AI tooling. It became the app’s first shipped UI. Rebuilding the screens against it was a screen-by-screen job: the Home deck picker, Settings, Words browse and detail, Statistics, the Reader lookup sheet, the study all-caught-up screen, and the onboarding flow.
Doing it screen by screen matters. A visual redesign applied all at once breaks everything at once. Rebuilding one screen at a time, with a snapshot test on each, keeps the app working while it changes.
Canvas v4 was efficient, but too flat and impersonal. In October we moved to a v2 that added what v4 lacked: a Wada palette, ink and paper surfaces, a subtle grain, and card-reveal animations. It shipped as release 1.2.0.