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How a design is built

Design Studio is a canvas editor with a planner bolted to the front, and understanding that split explains most of its behaviour.

The AI plans, it does not paint

Section titled “The AI plans, it does not paint”

Create with AI produces a document with real elements: text you can retype, shapes you can move, pages you can delete.

That is why the brief has seven steps rather than one box. The wizard is gathering the decisions a designer would make before drawing — format, tone, page count, audience, message, output intent — and each one constrains what gets built. The summary before generating names what it took from the brief, which is the module telling you what it is about to act on.

The consequence for how you use it: a wrong result is usually a wrong brief, and the fix is upstream. Editing generated output by hand works, but re-briefing costs less.

The panels are three different things

Section titled “The panels are three different things”

They sit in one rail and behave quite differently.

Content sources — Photos, Uploads, Templates, Brand — supply material from elsewhere.

Generators — Trees, 3D, Machines, and the generative systems inside Elements — make new material from parameters, and stay editable afterwards. The Machines panel says so explicitly: tune the machine in the properties panel after placing it.

Document structure — Pages and Resize — change the shape of the design rather than its contents.

Knowing which kind you are in tells you where to look for controls. Generators put their settings in the properties panel after placement, not in the panel you added them from.

Size is a decision, not a setting

Section titled “Size is a decision, not a setting”

Every entry point asks for size early: the create dialog leads with categories and presets, and the AI brief asks for format at step two.

That is deliberate, and Resize is honest about why — it changes the canvas and leaves the elements alone unless you ask otherwise, because there is no general rule for what a layout should do when its proportions change.

Section titled “Print and screen are different products”

The format presets carry DPI, the brief has an export intent, and preflight exists at all.

A design built at 72 DPI for a banner is not a poster at a smaller size; it lacks the information a printer needs. The module keeps the two paths visible rather than pretending one file serves both.

Section titled “Related”

Generate with AI covers the brief. Add elements covers the generators.