Canto AI
In short
Canto AI is the page for Canto's Active DAM, the part that finds the photo from a shoot two years ago that nobody named properly. It lives on its own subdomain and inherits nothing from canto.com. So I built every component on it, from the type scale up.
Canto's Active DAM gets its own subdomain and its own rules. The job was explaining what the AI actually does to a library you already have, without leaning on the word doing the explaining.
Everyone shipped at once
I read through every competitor AI page I could find before starting. Most of them are a hero image, three benefit cards, and the word intelligent carrying an argument the way one nail holds up a shelf full of books. So this one starts with your stuff, on a Monday, when you go looking for a photo from a shoot two years ago and can't remember what anyone named it.
The order came first
What it is, what it does to assets you've already got, what it looks like running. That order cost the page a hero moment, and I traded it on purpose. A big opening image is the fastest way to look expensive, and it would have pushed the demonstration down past where people stop. I'd rather someone hit the third screen and decide, than look at the first one and think it's a nice piece of design.
Nothing to inherit
It lives on ai.canto.com rather than canto.com/ai, which reads like a routing decision and isn't one. Off the main site the page inherits nothing. No nav, no design system, none of the marketing site's assumptions about what a page is for. So every component on it was built for it, from the type scale up. That is slower on day one, and it paid back inside a week. Web and SEO reviewed it and carried it upward, which is the reason it shipped as designed.
Building without a component library, after years of owning one, was more fun than I expected. No governance call, no precedent to check, just what this page needs.
What I watched
Two numbers that had to move together: scroll depth into the middle third, then clicks through to a demo. Canto owns the conversion reporting. They moved together. The split I was watching for, lots of scrolling and nobody asking for a demo, never showed up.
Sitting off the main site means it can't borrow canto.com's traffic either. Whatever the page earns, it earns on its own, which is about the right amount of pressure for a claim this size.
Behind the work
- Company
- Canto
- Date
- 2026
- Role
- Design & front-end
- Platform
- Standalone subdomain
- What I was solving for
- Every vendor shipped an AI page in the same stretch, most of them a hero image, three benefit cards and the word intelligent carrying the argument. This one had to open on your own library instead, on the Monday you go looking for a photo nobody named.
- What I learned
- Building without a component library, after years of owning one, was more fun than I expected. No governance call, no precedent to check, just what the page needed.