Build Modern and Robust Canvas Apps Using a Minimalistic Design

By providing insights along a real world-demo, the presentation took part in the Microsoft 365 and Power Platform bi-weekly community call, directed by David Warner.

In this episode of the Community call, I’ve discussed modern and robust Canvas app development using minimalistic design principles. I wanted to share my approach to building Power Platform Canvas apps that are both functional and visually appealing.

My speech emphasized six key points for professional app development:

1. using design standards and modern UI components,
2. implementing design tokens for consistent colors,
3. building single-page applications with multiple screens,
4. utilizing containers for proper content organization,
5. maintaining consistent navigation patterns, and
6. separating data actions from data visualization.

I demonstrated these concepts through a real-world parking management app built for a Swiss music festival, showing how to create clean interfaces with proper screen layouts, navigation bars, and form structures. In my understanding, good UI design must work together with solid app architecture to create solutions that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also technically robust and scalable.

The general purpose of this speech was to inspire developers to adopt structured design frameworks and architectural principles when building Canvas apps, moving away from the traditional approach of creating messy collections of uncoordinated UI elements.

Resources