Document Designer: Elements Enhancements
Rachel Dew
Some features I would love to see added to Elements:
- The ability to be able to copy/or duplicate an existing element that is on the canvas. This would save me time from having to manually configure the features for identical designed elements.
- The ability to be able to snap the element's location to the canvas grid
- The ability to be able to resize and snap the element handles to the canvas grid
- The ability to be able to add move/arrange elements relative to other elements (behind/below, on top/above, Centered to each other, Distributed Horizontally, Distributed Vertically)
- The ability to assign elements to layers, this could help with layering
- The ability to be able to group elements together
- The ability to be able to reformat multiple elements at a time one time
- The ability to lock certain elements (so you don't accidently move it while trying to configure something else.
Jon Darbyshire
Hey Rachel Dew, thanks for your feedback! I have a few more questions for you:
- Can you provide more details on how you envision the 'group elements' feature to work?
- Could you elaborate on the 'assign elements to layers' feature? How would you like to interact with these layers?
- Can you describe a scenario where you needed to 'reformat multiple elements at a time', and how the current system hindered you?
Rachel Dew
Hi Jon Darbyshire,
- Yes, in my example I've layered a text box over rectangle, it would be nice to group those two elements together so that I can move them at the same time or be able Resize multiple objects at the same time.
I think it would also ensure that grouped elements that need to move down the page because a list table above it is growing, would move down as a unit.
- In many document designer there is the ability to be able to move an element in front/above or behind/below another element (reference Canva Word/powerpoint). Which works great, however assigning an element to a layer is a bit more advanced (reference Photoshop/Lucid Chart) and help organize the elements on the page a bit better.
A few use cases:
- I could put an image to one layer (background) then I can go to another layer above it and insert fields elements on top of the image without inadvertently moving the the image.
- Or I could marquee select all the elements on one layer without inadvertently selecting moving the elements that have been placed in a different layer.
- Maybe having the ability to toggle the layer with an an automation would be useful, for example I could have a watermark on 1 layer that would be toggled on for proposals, and for the final document the watermark is removed. Right now to have something like that, I would need to create two different templates.
- For example on my template I was making I needed 4 rectangle that were the same width, height, and color. I legit had to drag each one on to the page and go through the process of setting the height, width, and color, for each of the 4 items. It would have been nice to select all four items and set those parameters at once. Having the ability to duplicate would be useful, however even after you've duplicated something you might decide to tweak one little thing, and to do that you currently have to go into each of the element's options to do the tweak.