If you were hoping to find undifferentiated praise or scathing hatred of canvases, you’re wrong here ;-) If you’re just looking for the list of all canvases, scroll down.

When working with canvases first started to catch on, after Alex Osterwalder and his many collaborators published Business Model Generation, it felt like a natural extension of all other ways of information becoming more visual. At the time, we lovingly called it “Canvanizing”, hence the name Canvanizer.

The brilliant insight that seems to be the basis for the Business Model Canvas and many other great canvases: Make complex things easy to visualize in a way that helps people recognize patterns.

Image by ©sugarraybanister

This insight is the beauty of using canvases. Teams and organizations have a much easier time getting their collective ideas on paper, understand their implications, talk about them visually and test them against reality.

What’s missing to create magic?

Whenever teams manage to do this, canvases work great and create a lot of value! Unfortunately very often teams don’t dive deep enough and don’t create real understanding. As with most things in life, there is no shortcut, so teams that think it takes a few post-its and 60 minutes to understand their business model, customer journey or corporate culture, fail miserably. Even though canvases make visualization easier, you still need to do the work, iterate and question your results constantly, until they are simple and smart, not simple and stupid.

At the same time, when we create these great models we are still missing something. We are missing a connection between these different canvases. Little islands of insight are formed, but they are still missing their connections to create a big picture of the business.

So there is still some work to do, until we can claim that all these great canvases are saving the (business) world. But we are well on our way to get there!

All the (magical) canvases we could find

Since we were talking about all these canvases, we thought, why not list them all? Since we’re pretty obsessed with the topic, I think we can provide a good list. But should we have missed one, please comment underneath and we will add it.

Canvases for understanding business & innovation

• Business Model Canvas
• Value Proposition Canvas
• Value Proposition Canvas by Peter J. Thomson
• Lean Canvas
• Business Model Zen Canvas
• Disruption by Design Canvas
• Social Lean Canvas
• Social Blueprint Impact Canvas
• Product Vision Board
• The GO Product Roadmap
• The Product Canvas
• Product Market Fit Canvas
• Social Business Model Canvas
• Product Canvas by Shardul Mehta
• Product Canvas by ProdPad
• The Innovation Canvas
• The Idea Canvas
• The Big Idea Canvas

Canvases for Service Design

• Customer Journey Canvas
• Service Blueprint
• Roman’s Persona Template
• Empathy Map
• Stakeholder Map
• Journey/Swimlane Map
• Empathic Negotiation Canvas by Manuel Gassler
• User Centered Design Canvas by The Rectangles

Canvases for the work with organizations

• Lean Change Canvas
• Open Innovation Canvas
• Canvas4Change
• HR Innovation Canvas
• Social Process Model

Canvases from diytoolkit.org (Nesta)

• Innovation Flowchart
• Evidence Planning
• Building Partnership Maps
• Learning Loop
• Experience Tour
• Problem Definition
• Causes Diagram
• Theory of Change
• People Shadowing
• Interview Guide
• Question Ladder
• Storyworld
• People & Connections Map
• Target Group
• Personas
• Promises & Potential Map
• Creative Workshop
• Fast Idea Generator
• Thinking Hats
• Value Mapping
• Improvement Triggers
• Prototype Testing Plan
• Experience Map
• Blueprint
• Marketing Mix
• Critical Tasks List
• Business Plan
• Scaling Plan

Other canvases

• Pitch Planner Canvas
• SWOT Canvas
• The Project Canvas
• Contract Canvas
• Meeting Facilitator Canvas
• Roman’s Sprint Goal Template
• Presentation Canvas
• Buyer Persona Canvas
• Persona Development Canvas
• Gamification Model Canvas
• Internet Presence Canvas
• Requirement Discovery Canvas
• Minimum Viable Prototype Canvas
• Consumer Trend Canvas
• Event Model Canvas
• Mission Model Canvas

Edit: March 5th 2016, additional canvas

• Mission Model Canvas

Edit: March 8th 2016, additional canvas

• Value Proposition Canvas by Peter J. Thomson

Edit: April 22nd 2016, additional canvas

• Empathic Negotiation Canvas by Manuel Gassler

Edit: May 5th 2016, additional canvas

• User Centered Design Canvas by The Rectangles

Edit: May 6th 2016, additional canvas

• The Idea Canvas
• The Big Idea Canvas