Designing
The Design mode toolset — frames, shapes, text, components.
Design is the default mode: the one with the whole toolset in it. Everything here works on an infinite canvas or on fixed pages, depending on the kind of file you made.
Your first design
Description
An empty canvas in Design. F picks the frame tool and a frame is dragged out. T picks the text tool; a click in the frame starts a text layer and “Summer menu” is typed. R picks the rectangle tool and a rectangle is dragged under the heading. The layers panel lists the three new layers inside the frame.
- Press F (or pick the frame tool) and drag out a frame. That's your artboard.
- Press T, click inside the frame and type. Press Esc when you're done.
- Press R and drag out a rectangle. Every shape, text and frame you make shows up in the layers panel, inside the frame you drew it in.
- Select anything to change it in the inspector on the right: fill, stroke, size, type.
Rather start from something finished? New → File has templates for every kind of file (see Getting started).
The pieces
| Guide | What's inside |
|---|---|
| Frames and pages | Artboards, sections, auto layout, grids, guides |
| Shapes and vectors | Drawing paths, booleans, masks |
| Text | Type, OpenType, text on a path, effects |
| Fills and effects | Gradients, images, patterns, shaders, shadows, blurs, halftones |
| Components and styles | Reusable parts, variants, styles, variables, libraries |
| Photos | Openly licensed stock photos, with their credits |
| Media library | Reuse the uploads and generated media your teams' files already hold |
| Generating video | Clips from a prompt or a start frame with Seedance, Veo and Grok |
| Migrating from Publisher | .pub import plugin, masters, text wrap |
Selecting things
Click to select. Click again into a group or frame to reach what's inside, or double-click to dive
straight in. Enter opens the selected object for editing — points on a vector, characters in a
text layer.
Drag a marquee to catch everything it touches. Hold Shift to add to the selection, Alt to
duplicate as you drag, and both to constrain the drag to an axis.
Snapping
PopCraft snaps to the edges and centres of nearby objects and shows you why: a line appears between the things that are lining up. It also snaps to equal spacing — when three objects are evenly spread, the gaps are labelled, so a row stays a row.
Alt and hover measures the distance from the selection to whatever is under the pointer.
Aligning
The align and distribute controls sit at the top of the inspector. Tidy up (Mod+Alt+T) is the
one-key version: it takes a rough cluster and makes it a clean row, column or grid with even gaps.
Arranging
Layers draw bottom-up in the layers panel, so the top row is the front. Mod+] and Mod+[ move a
layer one step; add Shift to send it all the way.
Group (Mod+G) holds things together. A Frame does too, but it also clips, can have a
layout, and can be exported or prototyped on its own — reach for a frame unless you only want a
bag of layers.