Just Now Possible Building Banani: How a Canvas-First AI Designer Is Raising the Floor on Product Design
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Apr 2, 2026 Vova Kovalchuk, CTO and co-founder of Banani, builds agent and tooling architecture. Vlad Solomakha, CEO and co-founder, is a product designer focused on canvas-first AI design. They discuss why Banani chose a canvas-first UI, how surgical edits replace full-screen regeneration, managing per-screen histories across large projects, and the agent approaches that bridge the gulf of specification.
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Figma Plugin Proved Demand And Guided Product
- Banani's first working product was a Figma plugin used to validate design generation feasibility.
- The plugin proved organic demand as designers used it, which convinced the team to build a full standalone product.
Start Inside Where Designers Already Work
- Find distribution inside the established platforms your users already use to get early organic growth.
- Banani grew 95% organically by starting as a Figma plugin before building a standalone product.
Canvas First Designer Workflow Beats Chat First Tools
- Banani is canvas-first: designers interact visually on a canvas while an agent generates or edits screens.
- This keeps designers in control, enables parallel edits, and avoids developer-focused, code-centric workflows.