Design Studio

What Design Studio is for

Design Studio makes the printed and shareable things your business needs: flyers, posters, menus, price lists, event bills and social posts. You start from a layout that already works, replace the words and pictures with your own, and download a file you can print or post.

Everything you make is saved against your business, so you can come back and change it later — next month's offer is usually last month's flyer with two lines changed.

Starting a design

From Design Studio → New design you can begin in three ways:

• A blank sheet — A4, A5, A3 or a square social post.
• A photo layout — choose a template, add your picture and headline, and the layout is built around what you type. A longer headline makes room for itself.
• Describe it — tell us what the design is for and we will write a first draft of the words for you. You can edit every one of them afterwards.

Layouts that use several photos are listed with the number they are built around — "Four photos", for example. You do not have to supply all of them: give it two and the layout repeats them rather than leaving a gap.

Pictures

Click the picture tool in the left-hand rail to open your image library. You can:

• Upload your own — several at once. PNG, JPEG, GIF or WebP, up to 20MB each.
• Search stock photos — if photo search is set up for your region, the Stock photos tab lets you search professional photographs and drop one straight into your design. The photographer is credited automatically.

To swap a picture that is already in a layout, select it and use Replace photo. That keeps the crop, shape and styling the layout chose for it, which starting again would throw away.

Making a photo look deliberate

With a picture selected, the panel on the right offers:

• Shape — crop it to a circle, an arch, a hexagon and more. An arched or circular photo reads as designed where a plain rectangle reads as pasted in.
• Look — Mono, Noir, Warm, Faded and others. Backdrop is the one to reach for when a photo has to sit behind text: it darkens and softens the picture so the words stay readable.
• Frame — a border in any colour.
• Focus — when a photo is cropped, this decides which part of it survives.

Words

Double-click any text on the page to edit it, or select it and type in the panel.

• Typeface — 28 to choose from, each shown in its own lettering. They are grouped by what they are for: display faces carry a headline, serif and sans faces suit body text. If your flyer is in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali or Gujarati, use one of the faces in the Indian scripts group — other faces cannot draw those letters.
• Size is a percentage of the page width, not points. That is what lets the same design print as a postcard and as a poster without being re-laid-out.
• Colour — a flat colour, or a gradient across the letters. Gold foil on a headline is the single quickest way to make a festival flyer look expensive.
• Outline — a line around the letters, which keeps a headline legible over a busy picture.
• Badge — a coloured shape behind the words. A date or a price in a badge stops it being mistaken for ordinary text.

Shapes, icons and decoration

The left-hand rail also gives you:

• Shapes — rectangles, ellipses and lines, plus decorative ones: stars, bursts, ribbons, chevrons and arches.
• Icons — a phone beside your number, a pin beside your address, a tag beside your offer. They are drawn rather than pasted, so they take your brand colour exactly.
• Scrim — a dark wash that fades out. This is the fix when white text over a photograph is hard to read: it goes above your pictures and below your words, so only the photo is dimmed.

Effects

Anything on the page can take a shadow, an opacity and a blend mode. Pick a named shadow rather than setting numbers: Soft and Lift make something sit above the page, Glow lights a headline from behind, Hard gives the flat poster look.

Finding something you cannot click

The Layers list at the top of the right-hand panel shows everything on the page, topmost first. Use it when a picture is hidden behind something else — click the row to select it however it is covered.

You can also rename a layer by double-clicking its name, move it forward or back a step, and lock it. A locked layer stays visible but stops catching your clicks, which makes it much easier to work on whatever sits underneath.

Changing the words with AI

The sparkle in the tool rail opens Change the words. Say what you want different — "make the headline shorter", "warmer", "mention the parking" — and only that changes. Everything you did not mention is left exactly as you wrote it.

Each attempt uses one OPS Credit, including trying again with a different instruction. If you do not like the result, undo puts your old words back.

More than one page

Use Add page above the canvas for a two-sided flyer or a multi-page menu. Pages can be duplicated and reordered, and every page is included when you export.

Changing the size

With nothing selected, the right-hand panel shows the page itself: size, orientation and background. Changing from A5 to A3 does not move anything — the layout is stored proportionally, so it simply redraws at the new size.

Exporting

Preview shows the finished sheet. Export gives you:

• PNG — for WhatsApp, social posts and email.
• Print PDF — with 3mm bleed added outside the trim line, which is what a commercial printer asks for. The artwork runs past the cut so there is no white edge after trimming.

Tips

• Put your words on a panel or a scrim, never straight onto a busy photograph.
• Two typefaces is plenty — one for headlines, one for everything else.
• Say less. A flyer is read in about two seconds, usually while someone is walking.
• Print one copy before ordering five hundred. Colours on paper are never quite the colours on a screen.