We’re kicking off something new with this post — the first contribution from our newest guest blogger, Michael Erikson. Michael spent his career at Boeing as an Associate Technical Fellow, working as an Envisioner using canvasxdraw to help Boeing’s engineering community turn complex ideas and workflows into clear visual illustrations. He’s been using the tool since 1990, through every iteration of it, and he’s joining our instructional video series to share what three and a half decades of hands-on illustration work looks like in practice

Introducing Our Newest Guest Blogger: Michael Erikson, Boeing (Retired)

Blog, Featured Post12 hours ago4Views 0Likes 0Comments

canvasxdraw How-To Series, Episode 13: Practical Sketching 101 We’re kicking off something new with this post — the first contribution from our newest guest blogger, Michael Erikson. Michael spent his career at Boeing as an Associate Technical Fellow, working as an Envisioner using canvasxdraw to help Boeing’s engineering community turn complex ideas and workflows into…

Canvas X Draw How-To Series, Episode 12: Keyboard Shortcuts That Actually Save Time

Blog, Featured Post3 days ago11Views 0Likes 0Comments

Paul Dufour is back for the next installment of the How-To series. By his own admission, he’s “a mouse guy” but there’s a short list of keyboard shortcuts he reaches for constantly, and this episode walks through all of them. What You’ll Learn: A handful of Canvas X Draw shortcuts that speed up the parts…

Industry Spotlight:

Blog, Featured PostOctober 20, 202625Views 0Likes 0Comments

How canvasxdraw Powers Patent Illustration Part 2 of a series: one industry, one tool, the use cases that run on it. Last time we looked at aerospace and defense, where the line between a correct drawing and an incorrect one can be the line between a working aircraft system and a dangerous one. Patent illustration…

Industry Spotlight:

Blog, Featured PostOctober 15, 202637Views 0Likes 0Comments

How canvasxdraw Powers Aerospace & Defense Technical Illustration Part 1 of a series: one industry, one tool, the use cases that run on it. Every industry we serve asks canvasxdraw to do something slightly different. Starting with this post, we’re running a short series walking through specific industries and the real use cases teams in…

What Aviation Accident Reports Teach Us About Technical Documentation

When the Manual Is Wrong:

Blog, Featured PostOctober 13, 202653Views 0Likes 0Comments

What Aviation Accident Reports Teach Us About Technical Documentation In January 2024, a door plug blew out of a nearly new Boeing 737-9 climbing out of Portland. The cause wasn't a design flaw or a pilot error. Four bolts had never been reinstalled at the factory, and, as the NTSB found, the work that removed…

What the 2026 State of Docs Report Means for Technical Illustrators

Docs Are Now Read by Machines Too:

Blog, Featured PostOctober 8, 202680Views 0Likes 1Comment

What the 2026 State of Docs Report Means for Technical Illustrators AI has gone mainstream in technical documentation. According to GitBook's State of Docs 2026, a survey of 1,131 documentation professionals, 76% now use AI regularly at work, up 16 points in a single year. But the most interesting finding isn't how fast writers are…

canvasxdraw How-To Series

Blog, Featured PostOctober 6, 202668Views 0Likes 0Comments

Episode 12: Entity Attributes After a short break, the canvasxdraw How-To Series is back and so is Paul Dufour, retired Boeing Technical Fellow and longtime canvasxdraw user. In this episode, Paul walks through entity attributes: the pen weight, pen color, fill color, arrowheads and other properties that define how every object in your drawing looks. …

The Vector Core:

Blog, Featured PostOctober 1, 202672Views 0Likes 0Comments

Why Precision Is Still Non-Negotiable in Technical Illustration Change can be necessary. Reckless abandonment of proven core technology is simply bad engineering. That line was true when we said it about one acquisition. It's just as true as a standing principle for the whole industry, because the pressure to treat illustration tools as interchangeable by…

For decades, Canvas has earned its reputation with engineers and technical illustrators: aerospace and defense teams, manufacturers, patent illustrators and documentation groups who need drawings that are exact. That precision is the core of the product, and it isn't going anywhere.

A Tool for People with Vision

Blog, Featured PostSeptember 30, 202680Views 0Likes 0Comments

Around 2000, a Japanese man named Tatsuo Horiuchi was getting close to retirement and wanted a new challenge. He decided to take up painting, but he didn't buy brushes, canvas or expensive graphics software. He opened Microsoft Excel. "I never used Excel at work," he later said, "but I saw other people making pretty graphs…

Where Creativity Meets the Micron:

Blog, Featured PostSeptember 24, 202691Views 0Likes 0Comments

Why Precision Drawing Is Still a Craft Every technical illustration starts as an idea in someone's head. Perhaps an engineer picturing how a bracket seats, a patent attorney describing a mechanism in words, a field technician explaining how a valve actually behaves under load. Getting that idea onto the page, accurately enough to become a…

The Balance Between Human and Machine:

Blog, Featured PostSeptember 22, 202687Views 0Likes 0Comments

Why Technical Illustration Still Needs a Steady Hand AI can generate an image in seconds. What it can't tell you is whether that image will survive contact with a patent examiner, pass an FAA documentation audit, or match the as-built geometry of a part that must seat within microns of spec. For most creative work,…

Not All “Dead” PDFs Are Actually Dead: What Determines Whether a PDF Can Become Editable Vector Data Again

Blog, Featured PostSeptember 17, 2026135Views 0Likes 0Comments

"The client only sent us a PDF" is treated as a dead end more often than it should be. Whether a PDF can be recovered as real, editable vector data depends entirely on what's inside the file and that's not something you can tell just by looking at it on screen. Two Fundamentally Different Kinds…

Introducing Our Newest Guest Blogger: Michael Erikson, Boeing (Retired)

Canvas X Draw How-To Series, Episode 12: Keyboard Shortcuts That Actually Save Time

Industry Spotlight:

Industry Spotlight:

When the Manual Is Wrong:

Docs Are Now Read by Machines Too:

canvasxdraw How-To Series

The Vector Core:

A Tool for People with Vision

Where Creativity Meets the Micron:

The Balance Between Human and Machine:

Not All “Dead” PDFs Are Actually Dead: What Determines Whether a PDF Can Become Editable Vector Data Again

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