Create a design template

Start a new template

Go to Design Templates and click Create template.

Choose your canvas size

Pick one of the ready-made artboard sizes, or set your own width and height.

Preset	Size
T-Shirt	14 × 16 in
Pants	12 × 14 in
Tote Bag	15 × 16 in
Mug Wrap	2550 × 1155 px
Phone Case	3 × 6 in
Sticker	4 × 4 in
Poster	16 × 20 in
Postcard	4 × 6 in
Business Card	3.5 × 2 in

For a custom size, type a width and height and pick your unit: pixels, centimetres, millimetres, or inches. If you work in a physical unit, set the DPI to match what your printer expects; 300 is the usual choice for print.Give the template a name you’ll recognise later, because you’ll be picking it from a list when you build the option set. Then click Create.

Use the size your printer asks for, not the size of the product photo. The canvas is what gets printed.

Get your bearings in the editor

The template opens straight into the design editor.

The two canvases side by side are the part worth understanding:

• Design Template is the artwork itself, at print size. This is what ends up on the product.
• Design Preview wraps that artwork onto a photo of the real product, so you and your customer can see how it will look.

Anything you add while the Design Preview frame is selected stays on the preview only. It is never printed. If the Elements panel warns you that you’re editing the Design Preview, click the Design Template canvas first.

There’s more to the two frames than this: how the preview keeps up with your design, and what happens when it stops. See The design and preview frames.

Add your artwork

Open the Elements panel from the top of the tool rail and click what you want to add.

Element	Use it for
Text	Names, dates, messages, anything a customer types
Placeholder Image	A frame your customer fills with their own photo
Dynamic Image	A picture that swaps depending on what the customer picks
QR Code	A code built from a link the customer enters
Calendar	A date shown as a calendar page
Moon Phase / Star Map	The night sky on a date the customer chooses
Map	A location the customer searches for
Crossword / Word Search / Word Cloud	A puzzle or cloud built from words the customer types
String Art	A customer’s photo turned into thread wound between nails on a board

Select anything on the canvas and its settings (font, size, colour, position) appear in the panel on the right.

For a first template, one Text layer and one Dynamic Image layer is plenty. You can always add more later.

Check your layer numbers

Open the Layers panel from the tool rail. Every layer on your canvas is listed with a number next to it.

This is the most important thing on the page. When you later tell an option set “put the customer’s answer here”, you point it at one of these numbers. An option connected to #14 writes into this exact text layer.Two habits will save you a lot of confusion later:

• Name your layers. Double-click a layer name and type something you’ll recognise, such as Kid’s Name or Background photo. In the option set you’ll see the name next to the number.
• Watch for repeats. Layer numbers are not always unique. In the screenshot above, three separate layers are called Kid’s Name, and elsewhere in the same template two layers share the number #3.

If two layers share a number, an option connected to that number may change the wrong one. When you pick the layer in the option set, Customei asks you which of the matching layers you meant. Choose carefully, and rename the layers so you can tell them apart.

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