Overview of the Online Designer

The new Ecommerce Online Designer was rebuilt from the ground up and has extensive functionality that was not previously available. These new features will make it easier to create customizable artwork templates as well as having granular control over what the end-user can do, such as replace images in placeholders, manipulate elements, support for multiple sides (surfaces), and basic preflight checks.

NOTE: Due to the significant differences between the previous Online Designer and the new one, there is no direct migration path and customizable artwork will need to be rebuilt for each product.

One of the important distinctions of the new Online Designer is that templates are primarily built outside of the application in either Adobe Photoshop (preferred) or Adobe InDesign (support for Adobe Illustrator will be available at a future date). This means that your design staff does not need to learn a new design application from scratch, but simply what the supported features are.

The Online Designer is driven by the use of templates. A template defines the entire customizable product, eg. a business card, brochure, book, or other design product. A template is made up of one or more surfaces (a surface is effectively a side, eg. a two-sided business card has two surfaces, the front, and the back). Each surface has it's own artwork elements that are unique to it (artwork elements cannot be shared between surfaces).

It's possible for a product in Ecommerce to have one or more templates. If the product has more than one template, the templates can be organized into one or more Groups. When a user on the Store is viewing a customizable product in the Online Designer that has more than one template, they will be able to select from different templates to build out their customized artwork. This is particularly useful in scenarios where the finished product is the same size, eg. a tri-fold brochure, but there are templates for different themes, eg. real estate, restaurant, or music festival. This way it's not necessary to build out a new product for each theme.

NOTE: If you choose to build products with multiple templates, the price of the product is NOT affected by the selection of the template.

The Online Designer has two types of editors available. Access to the editor types for end-users are controled in the Admin Panel. The basic editor allows the end-user to only modify predefined text and image fields. It is very customer-friendly as the user does not have to learn a lot of commands to use it, and in most cases, it is more than enough. The advanced editor grants additional functionality to end-users including; moving, scaling, rotating template elements, changing the ordering, Deleting and cloning elements, changing text formatting, and adding new elements.