Easily create, customize, and perfect your designs with our intuitive Design Editor. This powerful tool gives you full creative control over your graphics, layouts, and other visual content.

The Design Editor is an add-on feature with an additional cost. If you are interested in using it, please contact your Customer Success Manager.

Working with the Design Editor

Working with Blank Templates

Under the "Mail Material Templates" section, you will find various starting templates for different materials and countries. 

These starter templates already include predefined printing rules such as margin, bleeding sizes, and address box positioning. To begin, open the template you want to use and save a new version of it by clicking the save button in the top left corner.

Understanding Design and Personalization Files

When working with the Design Editor, you will need to upload two types of files for your campaigns, depending on your material's configuration:

1. The design file: This file is a version of your design that does not contain any variables or individualizations. Instead, it has blank spaces where those elements would normally be. This file is always required for any material you create.
2. The personalized example file:This is the same design file, but with all the variables and individualizations in place. This file is only required if you have configured your material for digital personalization.

Adding Variables to Your Designs

There are two ways to handle variables in your design:

Variables on a White Background

In this case, you must simply color the variable text with the color option named "individusalisation". The color itself is magenta, but please make sure you select "individualisation" and not just magenta. Otherwise, the programming rules of the template will not be able to identify the coloured text as a variable

Variables on a Non-White Background 

For this case we have a layer named "individualisation". Everything inside of this layer will be considered a variable and thus removed by the template when creating the blank design file. You should place the frame containing the variable text in this layer. Please be careful to only include variable frames in this layer.

 You might have variables that are in between static text. In this case, you need to make sure that the static text and the variable text are in two different frames. Specifically, the frame containing the static text needs to have blank spaces where the variable text would be placed. Once you have this set, you can place the frame containing the variable on top of this blank space. Remember that the frame containing the variable text must be placed on the "individualisation" layer.

How to get the design file and the personalised example file PDFs

On the right hand side, you can find the "Variables" tab. Inside this tab you can find the "Show Individualisations" button which toggles the view between a design file and a personalised example file. You can find the "Output" tab right above the "Variables" tab, and in there you will find the PDF export functionality. You can then export each view with the PDF export functionality.

Working with assets

The design editor comes with an asset manager, which you can access by clicking on the "Manage Assets" button found on the top left corner of your screen. It is up to you how you want to manage your assets, here are some recommendations of how to best work with assets:

• Sometimes it makes sense to keep all assets grouped in folders that belong to a specific campaign or use case, even if this means duplicating assets across different folders. The upside of this approach is that you don't need to worry about accidentally changing assets that are re-used in other designs. The downside is then that you end up with more assets to manage. If you programmed your design to read images from a specific folder, dropping images there directly should also result in them appearing in the design automatically.
• If you have assets that should always be the same across all of your campaigns (e.g. company logos), then it might make sense to keep them in one folder which all of the other designs reference to. The upside of this is that you can have one single source of truth of this asset, and changing it in one place reflects the changes in all other designs.

Note that all changes made to your design need to be manually saved, otherwise you will lose the progress.

Creating a Pre-approved Design (professional template)

Pre-approved designs are designs that are highly customised and programmed to your exact needs. If you have a design team with strict design rules, or you have a perfectly crafted design and don't want to risk making unwanted changes, we can create templates with rules and a discrete interface that will allow you to make only the changes you care about. For example, a special dropdown to change the colour theme of your template, or a dropdown that gives you a pre-selected list of image options to display in an image frame, or perhaps a brand dropdown to switch the colour theme and the logo at the same time.

To get this started, we need you to share the design files with us. To ensure that we can re-create your template with the highest accuracy, we would need the InDesign zip file containing all the assets that are used in the design (e.g. fonts, images). We can also work with a PDF but it would take us longer to re-create the designs manually with our designer.