Create your first canvas

After signing up and completing onboarding, you land on your Home screen — the library of all your projects. This article walks you through starting your first one.

Create a project

1. From Home, choose New project (or pick a template from the templates section to start with structure already in place).
2. Give the project a name. Onboarding answers you provided (team, role, what you're working on) tune the project type and the suggestions Crux makes later.
3. The project opens on an empty strategy canvas.

Get to know the workspace

• The canvas fills the screen — an infinite board you can pan and zoom.
• The sidebar rail on the left gives you: search, the Nodes palette, pages, todos, project knowledge, uploads, activity, and help.
• Context actions at the bottom of the canvas let you run Platform Skills on selected nodes — draft documents, analyse research, answer questions, and more.

Place your first nodes

Open the Nodes panel from the sidebar rail and drag node types onto the board. Nodes are grouped by how teams work:

• Gather — research notes, file nodes, website links, prompts.
• Document — rich documents, tables, and matrices.
• Understand — coding and tagging, synthesis tables, analysis.
• Experience — personas, journeys, user flows, IA maps, page maps.

Connect nodes by dragging from a node's edge handle to another node. Edges are more than visual — they define which research feeds which conclusion, and AI skills follow them to build context.

Organise with pages

If a project grows beyond one board, add canvas pages (like pages in a design file) from the Pages panel — for example one page for discovery, one for synthesis, one for delivery. See Canvas pages.

Next step

Continue with Add your research to bring real evidence into the project.