Getting started
A tour of the workspace
The editor is built around one idea: a canvas you design on, surrounded by panels that change what you can do to whatever is selected. Once you know where the four main areas live, everything else falls into place.
The canvas
The large central area is the canvas stage. Each page you design is a canvas (you can have many in one document — think of them as artboards). Rulers run along the top and left edges; drag from a ruler to place a guide.
Zoom lives at the top-right: use the + / − buttons, or click the percentage to fit the design to your view. On a trackpad, pinch to zoom and two-finger drag to pan.
Tip: hold the spacebar to temporarily switch to the Pan tool, then release to go back to whatever you were doing.
The toolbar
The toolbar sits above the canvas. Every tool has a one-key shortcut, so you rarely need to reach for the mouse:
| Tool | Shortcut | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Select | V |
Move, resize and rotate objects |
| Scale | K |
Resize an object and its contents together |
| Text | T |
Draw a text frame and start typing |
| Rectangle | R |
Draw a rectangle (hold Shift for a square) |
| Ellipse | O |
Draw an ellipse (hold Shift for a circle) |
| Line | L |
Draw a straight line |
| Pen | P |
Draw custom paths point by point |
| Pan | H |
Drag the canvas around |
Next to the tools are quick-add buttons for a new canvas, an image, and a barcode or QR code.
A Display pill floats over the canvas: switch between Normal, Preview (W, hides
guides and grid) and Outline (Shift+W, wireframe), with a Fast display option that
speeds up very large files.
The panels
Three stacked panels line the right edge:
Properties
The Properties panel is context-sensitive — it shows the controls for whatever is selected. Select nothing and it shows document-level settings; select text and it becomes a full type inspector; select an image and you get fit, crop and resolution controls. This is where you'll spend most of your time.
Layers and Canvases
Layers is the outline of the current canvas: every object, in stacking order, with controls to hide, lock, rename, group and reorder. The Canvases list above it lets you add, duplicate and jump between pages. In a document with Facing pages turned on, this becomes the spread-aware Pages panel, where left and right pages sit together as spreads.
Blocks and Page templates
Blocks are reusable components — design something once, turn it into a block, and reuse it everywhere; edit the main block and every copy updates. Page templates do the same for a whole canvas, which is ideal for multi-page documents that share a layout.
The AI Assistant
The panel on the left is the Assistant. Describe what you want in plain language — "add a bold title at the top", "lay out a simple event poster", "make the background navy" — and it edits the canvas directly, showing each change as it works. You can point it at a brand kit so colors, fonts and tone stay on-brand.
The Assistant is at its most powerful when you give it real constraints: sizes, copy, and the look you're after. There's a whole guide on that approach in Design your own product labels.
Where to go next
You now know the map. Put it to work in your first design.