SWITCH TO
POPCRAFT!

Every design tool says moving in is easy. Then you find out the import is a screenshot in a trench coat, or it only reads files from a tool you never used. So before any pitch, here is the honest list.

PopCraft reads PDF, Lottie (.json and .lottie), Procreate brushes and its own .popcraft files, built in, and SVG pasted or dropped comes in as editable layers. An optional marketplace plugin reads Publisher. And PopCraft does not read Figma, Sketch, Adobe, Canva or Affinity files. No importer, no beta, no “coming soon” promise on this page. For those there is a route that works, and we will walk it.

Everything a typical job is made of, and how each piece gets through. Stamped honestly. If your file type is not here, the answer is the last line.

Let's make it concrete. Say you are halfway through a spring launch for a client: a social post set, a two-page brand sheet, a loading animation the developer already ships as a Lottie, and illustrations you draw with your own Procreate brushes. The client wants a teaser video by Friday. You decide this is the week you move.

Here is the week, day by day. Each step uses a few features together; the links go to the feature pages when you want the detail.

1. 1

   Monday · take stock

   List what the job is made of: screens, a logo, a brand PDF, a loader animation, the brushes you illustrate with. Then check each one against the declaration form above. Most jobs are three or four file types, not thirty.
2. 2

   Tuesday · the documents come over

   Export the old pages as PDF and import them. Every page is a frame of real layers, so you rebuild nothing to make a change. Lift the colours into styles as you go.
3. 3

   Wednesday · the brushes come over

   In Draw mode, Import in the brush library takes your .brushset. Draw a test stroke, nudge size and opacity on the brushes you use most, done. Brushes has the rest.
4. 4

   Thursday · the motion comes over

   The loader your developer already ships as a Lottie? Import it and it plays in Animate. Change the easing, then export it straight back as Lottie. Motion Studio goes deeper.
5. 5

   Friday · ship from the new place

   Hand off in Dev mode, or export the code yourself. Present the deck, publish the page, render the video. Nothing goes back through the old tool. Design to Next.js if that is where it lands.

We do not read their files. Rather than fake it, here is the route that works with what ships today:

1. 1

   Export PDF from the old tool

   Most design tools can export pages or frames as PDF. Check the export options in yours. A PDF keeps vectors and text, which is what we want.
2. 2

   Import it into PopCraft

   ⋯ → Import as new file…, or drop it on Home. Pages become frames of layers.
3. 3

   Bring single icons as SVG

   For an icon or a logo, copy it as SVG or export the file. Paste it, or drag it onto the canvas, and its paths arrive as editable layers you can recolour on the spot.
4. 4

   Rebuild the system, not the pages

   Components, styles and variables do not travel through a PDF. Turn the repeated bits into components and the colours into styles once, and every page after that is faster than in the old tool.

The single-letter tools and the ⌘ combos are the ones you have used for years. On Windows and Linux, ⌘ is Ctrl. A key belongs to the current mode, so B is the brush in Design and the pencil on a pixel canvas.

Illustrators lose the most when they switch, because a brush is years of tuning. In Draw mode, the brush library's Import takes a single .brush, a whole .brushset as a group, or a PopCraft .json brush. Shape and grain textures come across, and the settings map onto our engine: spacing, jitter, scatter, size and opacity curves, pressure and tilt, wet blending.

It is a translation. Expect to nudge size and opacity on the brushes you use daily, and know that Procreate settings with no equivalent are dropped rather than faked. Imported brushes live in your library, not in one file, so they follow you everywhere, and follow your account once you sign in.

Coming from Microsoft Publisher? Install the optional Publisher Import plugin from the marketplace and .pub files open through the same Import menu. It is best effort, built on the open source libmspub; for a stubborn document, export PDF from Publisher and import that. Master pages, threaded text, mail merge, bleed and crop marks are all here waiting. See Migrating from Publisher.

A few things work differently here on purpose. Know them on day one and they stop being surprises.