Podcast Design Canvas

Repository: customer/podcast-design-canvas

Create a self-serve visual podcast production workspace where creators transform synced multi-speaker raw recordings into polished, personalized, publishable video episodes without needing a traditional editor.

This repository is maintained against the product direction below. The maintainers use this document, VISION.md, and CONTRIBUTING.md as the standard for accepting or closing work.

Who It Serves

• Podcast creators who record with Riverside-style separate synced speaker tracks
• Solo hosts who want professional results without learning a complex editing suite
• Podcast teams and agencies producing repeatable show formats for multiple episodes or clients
• Power users who want to design, save, reuse, and eventually monetize custom podcast layouts

Product Workflows

• Create a new episode by importing a Riverside link or uploading separate synced video files for each speaker, then assign each file to clear speaker buckets such as Host, Guest 1, and Guest 2.
• Add host and guest social links during setup so the product can understand names, topics, references, brands, and likely transcript spellings before generating the edit.
• Choose a preset visual style with layout and pacing options, preview how the episode will look, and apply it without needing to manually position every element.
• Open a canvas editor to build or customize a reusable podcast layout by dragging and layering speaker video frames, shapes, backgrounds, captions, title elements, b-roll areas, and overlays.
• Clean and balance episode audio with simple controls for noise reduction, leveling, enhancement, and speech clarity, presented as creator-facing quality choices rather than technical audio settings.
• Use contextual editing tools to add captions, b-roll overlays, visual callouts, title moments, and short-form-style engagement patterns at key moments across a full-length episode.
• Save a finished layout or style as a reusable show template so future episodes can keep the same identity while still adapting to each episode's speakers and topics.
• Export a polished long-form video episode that feels deliberately edited, visually coherent, accurately captioned, and ready to publish.

Intended End State

A creator can go from raw synced podcast tracks and a few social links to a finished, professional-looking long-form episode with clean audio, accurate text, personalized context, engaging visual moments, and a reusable visual identity for the show.

Product Taste

• The product should feel like Canva adapted to podcast production: visual, direct manipulation, simple defaults, and creative freedom for advanced users.
• The default experience should emphasize preset quality: users should be able to get a polished result by choosing from clear style, layout, and pacing options.
• The pro experience should expose flexible canvas controls for custom layouts, layered shapes, branded frames, captions, overlays, and reusable templates.
• The system should support many podcast identities rather than a single house look: every show should be able to feel distinct.
• Visual edits should feel professional and intentional: clean framing, coherent layouts, readable captions, tasteful overlays, and rhythm that keeps a long episode engaging.
• Social context should make the edit smarter: better transcript spellings, relevant b-roll choices, more accurate references, better on-screen context, and captions or titles that fit the people speaking.

Accept Work That

• Merge clean PRs that pass CI, match the Vision Model, and improve an accepted workflow or quality bar.
• Prefer small coherent changes that can ship immediately over broad speculative rewrites.
• Treat product taste and user workflow fit as first-class acceptance criteria.
• Summarize merged work as product progress, not as raw PR activity.

Close Work That

• Close PRs that are incomplete, off-vision, overlapping, stale, or likely to create product drift.
• Do not leave requested-change queues by default. Close with clear resubmission guidance.
• Close technically correct PRs when they solve the wrong problem or move the product away from the captured vision.
• If a PR is promising but messy, explain the clean smaller PR that should be submitted next.

Repo Labels

Label	Multiplier	Meaning
episode-ingest	3	Improves importing, uploading, syncing, or assigning podcast episode source tracks and speakers.
preset-styles	2.5	Improves preset visual styles, layout choices, pacing choices, or first-preview quality.
canvas-editor	2.5	Improves reusable canvas editing for podcast layouts, layers, frames, overlays, and direct manipulation.
audio-captions	2	Improves audio cleanup, leveling, speech clarity, transcripts, captions, or text accuracy.
contextual-visuals	2	Improves context-aware b-roll, title moments, callouts, references, social context, or visual moments.
template-system	1.75	Improves saving, reusing, adapting, or managing show templates and reusable visual identity.
export-publish	1.75	Improves long-form episode export, publish readiness, rendering, or final delivery quality.
product-polish	1.5	Improves Podcast Design Canvas's feel, usability, clarity, or taste fit.
bugfix	1	Fixes broken behavior that blocks Podcast Design Canvas's captured product direction.
infrastructure	0.5	Improves checks, deployment, or repo operations without directly advancing product behavior.
off-vision	0	Technically plausible work that does not help Podcast Design Canvas converge on the captured vision.

Verification

• Run npm test before submitting product work.
• Run or preserve typecheck when the change introduces typed source files.
• Run or preserve lint when the change introduces linted source files.
• Run or preserve preview-build when a bundler or hosted preview build exists.
• Do not merge PRs that break the browser preview shell or connected episode flow.

Local preview

From the repo root:

npm run preview

Open http://localhost:8080/preview/ to walk the core episode flow. Verify the shell with:

npm test

The preview entrypoints are:

• Preview shell
• Connected episode flow