Get started with Designer

This article is your entry point to Designer. It covers what Designer is, the two ways to open it, the layout of the workspace, and how the contextual inspector works. By the end you'll know where to find any feature and where to go next for deeper guides.

In this article

• What Designer is
• The two ways to open Designer
• What you can do
• Your first design in two minutes
• The workspace: seven regions
• The inspector: contextual properties
• Saving, sharing, and collaboration
• How the workspace adapts
• Terminology
• Where to go next

What Designer is

Designer is built around three ideas:

• A canvas you fully control. Pages, layers, typography, color, effects, and arrangement are all directly editable. Nothing is locked behind a template.
• AI that works on the element you pick. Tools like Auto Layers, Auto Resize, and Ask Agent operate on the specific element selected, so you can iterate on one part of the design without regenerating the whole.
• Connectable to your workflows. When opened from inside a Spaces workflow, Designer can receive outputs from other workflow nodes and bind them to placeholders on the canvas, making the design a reusable, automatable template.

The two ways to open Designer

Designer ships in two places. Same engine, different entry points.

As a node inside a Spaces workflow

When you add a Designer node to a Spaces workflow, the editor opens with your canvas wired to whatever upstream nodes you have connected. Image and text outputs from those nodes appear as connections that you can drop onto image and text placeholders on the canvas. When you link a connection to a placeholder, that element becomes dynamic content: it re-renders automatically every time the workflow inputs change.

Use Designer as a node when:

• The design depends on content generated upstream, like an image from a generation node, a caption from a text node, or a result from an Auto Layers operation.
• You want the same design to re-render every time the inputs change.
• The design is part of a larger automation that ends with the design as the deliverable.

As a standalone tool

At /app/tools/design the same editor opens in standalone mode: no upstream workflow, no connections, full design freedom. From the same suite you can also launch other standalone tools that build on the Designer engine. Auto Layers turns any image into an editable design. Auto Resize reframes a design across multiple aspect ratios. And the Templates explorer lets you browse ready-made designs.

Use Designer standalone when:

• You're starting a new design from scratch or from a template.
• You want to import an image and decompose it into editable layers with Auto Layers.
• You want to take an existing design and produce variants for every social format you ship to, with Auto Resize.

The standalone surface is also the destination for deep links from elsewhere in Magnific. For example, opening a generated image in Designer from the media viewer.

What you can do

A non-exhaustive list of what Designer ships today. Each area has its own dedicated guide further into the Designer category.

Document and layout

• Multi-page documents with independent dimensions and units per page.
• Layers, groups, multi-selection, alignment, and arrangement.

Content

• Text with full typography control and a curated font library.
• Shapes and vector editing.
• Image elements with masks, sizing, and content fill modes.
• Pro-grade image adjustments and effects, including brightness, contrast, exposure, highlights, shadows, saturation, temperature, sharpness, and more.

AI on the canvas

• Edit with AI, Layerize, Auto Resize, and Agent. Each one operates on the selected element.

Templates and reuse

• Start from a template, save your design and reuse it whenever you need, including in Spaces.

Spaces integration

• Receive content from workflow nodes via connections and placeholders.

Persistence and collaboration

• Auto-save with manual version history.
• Real-time multi-user view with single-editor lock.

Delivery

• Per-element export configuration, four formats (PNG, JPEG, WebP, PDF), custom scales and naming.

Your first design in two minutes

A condensed flow for someone opening Designer for the first time:

The workspace: seven regions

The Designer workspace is built around the canvas in the center. Everything else either feeds content into the canvas, configures the selected element, or delivers the final result. Once you can name the seven regions, you can find any feature in seconds.

1. The canvas

The canvas is the working area where your pages live. It supports:

• Multi-page documents. Each page has its own dimensions and units, and pages flow vertically with a small gap between them. You can pan freely between pages.
• Direct manipulation. Click to select, drag to move, handles to resize, corner handles to rotate.
• Pan and zoom. Hold space to pan, use the scroll wheel or pinch to zoom. The footer shows the current zoom level and offers fit-to-page.
• Tool overlays. Some tools draw an overlay on the canvas. For example, the Create Page tool shows a sizing square while you drag, and the Shape tools show a preview while drawing.

2. The left sidebar

The left sidebar holds tabs that bring content into the canvas.

Each tab opens a panel that takes over the sidebar. Selecting a result in the panel, for example an image, drops it onto the canvas and selects it.

3. The toolbar

The toolbar is a fixed bar at the left side of the canvas. It holds the drawing and manipulation tools, plus quick access to undo and redo. The tools appear in this order:

4. The topbar

The topbar is a floating bar that appears directly above an element when you select it on the canvas. It provides quick-access actions relevant to that element type. For example, when an image is selected it shows options like Ask, Auto Resize, and Auto Layers. It disappears when nothing is selected.

5. The inspector

The inspector mirrors the toolbar but goes deeper. While the toolbar offers quick controls, the inspector exposes the full property list for the selected element, and switches its content based on what you have selected. The next section walks through all eight inspector views.

6. The header

The header sits at the top of the workspace. From here you can:

• Change the project title.
• Access version history.
• Export assets or pages.
• Create a new design from an existing template or a preset.
• Access the Agent.
• See the autosave status: saved, saving, or unsaved.

7. The footer

The footer is a thin strip at the bottom of the canvas. It shows the current zoom level, with quick actions to zoom in, zoom out, fit to page, and zoom to selection.

The inspector: contextual properties

The inspector is the panel on the right side of the workspace. It is contextual: its content adapts to whatever you currently have selected, so the same panel can show document settings one moment and per-element image properties the next. Knowing which view is in front of you is the fastest way to find the right control.

Think of the toolbar as the shortcuts row for the most common actions, and the inspector as the full property sheet. The inspector switches between eight views depending on selection.

1. No selection (document settings)

When you click on the empty canvas or use Escape to deselect everything, the inspector falls back to document settings. This is where you control properties that apply to the entire design, not just one element.

You'll find:

• Project name. The editable name of the design, shown in the header section and used as the default file name on export.
• Default export configuration. The format, scale, and naming defaults that apply to pages when you export them. Per-element overrides defined for individual elements take priority.
• Document presets. Lists the page-size presets available for this design.

This view is also the one to open when you want to set up things once and have them apply everywhere.

2. Page selected

Click on a page itself (not on an element inside it) to open page properties. This view controls everything specific to a single page in a multi-page document.

You'll find:

• Dimensions in width x height with a unit selector (px, mm, cm, in).
• Page presets. Quick-pick sizes for common social and print formats: Banner, Card, Event cover, Poster, Resume, Social cover, Social post, Social profile picture, Social story, Thumbnail. There's also a None option to keep the page free-form.
• Clip content. Whether elements that extend past the page boundary are visible or trimmed.
• Page-level export options.

3. Image element selected

The image properties view exposes everything specific to an image element:

• Dimensions and ratio.
• Sizing mode. How the image fits inside its frame: cover, contain, fit.
• Mask controls. Crop the image with a shape mask.
• Trim transparent. Remove transparent borders from the image.
• Adjustments and filters. The full pro panel with brightness, contrast, exposure, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, saturation, temperature, gamma, sharpness, and clarity.
• Include in export. The per-element toggle that marks this image for the Assets tab of the Export panel.
• Asset details. For images that come from a Magnific creation, go to the left sidebar, click on Assets, and select the image you want to use. The inspector shows the source (Tool used, Model, Prompt, Folder, Dimensions, Created date, Tags). This is read-only metadata, useful for tracing back to the original generation.

4. Text element selected

The text properties view exposes:

• Font family, weight, and size.
• Color (with palette and document colors).
• Alignment, letter spacing, line height.
• Background fill, padding, and corner radius for text-on-background designs.
• Per-text Include in export toggle.

5. Graphic element selected

The graphic properties view shows when you select a shape, vector graphic, or any non-image, non-text visual element. It exposes:

• Fill (solid or gradient).
• Stroke and stroke style.
• Border radius (for corners).
• Position and dimensions.
• Effects like shadow.
• Sizing.
• Opacity.
• Export.

Vector elements offer additional vector edit entry points for direct path manipulation.

6. Multiple selection

When you select more than one element, the inspector consolidates the properties that all selected elements share. The top of the inspector shows the count, like "3 elements selected". Properties that differ across the selection are shown as Multiple instead of a single value. Setting a value applies it to every element in the selection.

This view is also where you find alignment and distribution controls for the selection as a whole.

7. Content selected

When the selected element is a placeholder (an element marked to receive dynamic content from a Spaces workflow), the inspector shows placeholder-specific properties:

• Type. Image placeholder or Text placeholder.
• Label. A name for the placeholder, used in the Inputs panel and visible to anyone connecting a workflow to this design.
• Linked references. Which workflow connection currently fills this placeholder, if any. From here you can change the connection, unlink it, or remove the placeholder entirely.

This view is the canvas-side counterpart to the Placeholders tab in the left sidebar.

8. Create page mode

When you switch to the Create Page tool, the inspector displays a guide pointing you to click-and-drag on the canvas to define the new page. It also lists the available page presets so you can start from a known size instead of free-form.

Hiding the inspector

You can collapse the inspector to give the canvas more room. The inspector remembers whether you collapsed it for next time.

Saving, sharing, and collaboration

• Autosave runs continuously. You can see its state in the header.
• You can also create named save points in the version history.
• Multiple people can open the same design at once. The first to start editing gets the lock; everyone else sees a read-only view with full pan/zoom but no edit controls.

How the workspace adapts

A few behaviours worth knowing up front:

• Read-only mode. If you open a design someone else is already editing, you get a read-only view. The collaboration indicator in the footer tells you who has the lock.
• Inside a Spaces workflow. The Inputs subcategory inside the Images tab only appears when you're in a workflow context. In standalone mode, it's hidden.
• No selection. The inspector falls back to document-level controls when no element is selected. That is also where you set the default export configuration for the whole design.

Terminology

Designer consistently uses the term element for canvas items (images, text, shapes, graphics). Where you still see the word "block" in the product, it's legacy copy on its way out. The canonical product term is element.