I love single-use tools. The problem is, most of the ones traditionally used for design systems are built to do one narrow job and stop there.

You can use one to generate a type scale and another to build a color range. But before you know it, you’ll find yourself, for instance, paying for three different color tools because each approaches color generation slightly differently.

These tools are useful individually, but you still have to take their output into Figma and turn it into a working system.

And that's how Omni began, with the idea that those small, specific jobs should come together in one tool suite.

Omni takes the choices that a design lead or senior designer typically starts a pitch or long-term project with, applies the rules and checks we've developed across Canvs projects, and turns the result into an editable system ready for Figma.

Today, Omni can get a starter design system into place in a minute or two. Depending on the project and the team, the same setup can take anywhere from a day to two or three weeks by hand.

We have been using Omni inside Canvs. As we make it available beyond the studio, I want to show you how it has grown from a colour-scale generator into the tool suite we use today.

Omni is now open for demos with teams beyond Canvs. Book a session to see the suite in action.

1. Start with design foundations in minutes

When you begin a dashboard, website, iOS or Android product, you already know which conventions should guide it. The repetitive work is putting those conventions into place again and again.

Normally, you might pull up a system from a similar project, check the relevant platform guidance and adapt the foundation in Figma.

Omni compresses that starting work into one selection. Choose Website, Dashboard, iOS or Android, and the relevant conventions are applied immediately.

For instance, a dashboard begins with a sixteen-stop color scale, while an iOS interface gets ten. Omni carries the same product context across the rest of the system.

For native apps, we have built Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and Google’s Material Design guidelines into their respective archetypes.

This gives you a platform-appropriate starting point while keeping every value editable: you have the points to tweak rather than the points to create.

2. Turn key brand colors into complete, editable color ramps in one step

Brand guidelines usually give you a handful of key colors: a primary, perhaps a secondary and tertiary, and sometimes a neutral.

A product needs lighter and darker values around each one before those colors can work across an interface.

Building the same palette manually means adjusting the lightness of every stop and checking the progression one value at a time: 32 values for two dashboard brand colors, or 48 for three.

In Omni, all you need to do is paste two hex codes and all 32 values appear at once. Add a third, and you have 48.

Every stop remains editable, so you can review the complete palette and adjust what the interface needs.

An interesting bit of context: color is really where Omni began. I built the original canvas-palette around fixed rules drawn from color theory and research, and the scale generator’s core logic still powers Omni today.

3. Set up typography, grids and spacing faster with archetype presets

Type, grids and spacing are often set up through separate calculations, even though the output has to work as one system. Omni brings that setup together.

For type, you choose the font and base size. Omni generates a rounded scale and can snap the line heights to a four- or eight-pixel grid, keeping impractical decimal values out of the system.

The layout tool prepares columns, gutters, margins and breakpoints. It can account for a dashboard sidebar and give you a denser or airier grid to adjust.

Spacing is set up alongside them, with every value open to adjustment.

The values also arrive as tokens, with their names and groups already in place.

The first time we tokenized a system at Canvs, I spent two days establishing the nomenclature and entering every value manually. Once it was ready, the system felt about 50 times easier to use.

You could search for text instead of remembering gray-500. Omni gives you that structure as part of generating the system.

Putting color, type, grids, spacing and tokens into place can take anywhere from a day to two or three weeks, depending on the project and team. Omni gets the starter system into place in one or two minutes.

4. Get 95% of your design system foundations in place before export

Once the foundations are generated, you need to see how they behave together.

Each value can make sense on its own while the full interface still feels too dense, lacks hierarchy or carries a color that shifts in context.

Omni applies the system to sample interfaces, so you can review the palette, type, spacing and layout together before exporting anything.

You can also inspect color pairings against WCAG and APCA contrast standards. In one example, this wider view revealed that the darker end of an orange range had started to look red.

When something feels off, you can adjust the relevant value and see its effect across the preview before export.

Omni is meant to get you around 95% of the way there. The remaining work is the judgment specific to the product: seeing what needs to change and making the adjustment.

If you’re working on a pitch with tight deadlines, setting aside a day to build the system is rarely practical. You end up holding its logic in your head and applying it as you design.

Omni puts that structure in place early, so it can guide the pitch from the first screen.

5. Export 100+ tokens and variables to your design tool or agent in one click

Once the system has been reviewed, it still has to be moved into the working file.

That handoff can become another round of setup: creating the variables, naming and grouping them, and preparing the light and dark modes in Figma.

Omni carries the structure through. With one click, the values are exported with their names, groups and modes intact.

For a dashboard using sixteen-stop ranges, that can mean around 108 variables across light and dark modes arriving in Figma together.

You can continue refining the remaining 10% in the product itself. Agents receive the same system as structured information they can work from, rather than a collection of loose values.

One click to Figma, and everything is already there.

Built by the studio that uses it

Omni is built inside the studio that uses it across projects. New features come from recurring needs in our work, then get tested by the designers who will use them.

I define the design logic behind each tool. Hamsika Iyer, Product Designer, has begun building parts of the suite, including the grid tool. Rovin Cutinho, Chief Product Officer, has helped turn the original build into production-level infrastructure.

The workflow Arjun and Hamsika use to build Omni, with Rovin’s review agent checking each pull request before rework or release.

The product is now separated into related repositories, allowing us to work on one area without disrupting the rest of Omni. Contributions move through their own workspace, and are reviewed and merged before entering the shared product.

This setup allows Omni to grow beyond a tool built solely for the studio while keeping its underlying logic coherent.

The repositories behind Omni keep its app, service, UI library, configuration, infrastructure, authentication and shared applications separate, so one part can change without disturbing the rest.

What’s next: from atoms to components

The Omni you see today is only V0 of how far we think it can go across the design workflow. Atoms are where we began. Components are next, and there is plenty more we want to take on from there.

Omni currently helps designers put design-system foundations in place. The plan is for it to evolve into an agentic design harness that builds components, complete screens and live, project-aware libraries.

We’ll share more on this soon.

We are now opening Omni to teams beyond Canvs. Request a demo to see what it can put in place for your next product, in minutes.