Theo Pages

Stickers is a top-level section in the left dock, between Elements and Text. It gathers every sticker in one place: a curated Library of polished built-in stickers, a GIPHY stickers browser (transparent, searchable), and your saved My stickers. Click any one to drop it on the page — stickers place as normal images, so you can move, resize, rotate, and layer them like anything else.

Open the Sticker Lab to create an original sticker with AI: describe the subject, choose a style (die-cut, glossy 3D, kawaii, flat, pixel, holographic, hand-drawn, or clay), and toggle a transparent cut-out and a printed white outline. Insert it straight onto the page, or save it to My stickers to reuse across your designs. Animated GIPHY stickers play in the editor; PNG/PDF exports use a still frame.

Backgrounds sits in the left dock directly below Stickers, and gives every page a premium, art-directed look in one click. It’s organized into Styles, Patterns, and AI. Use Apply to all pages to dress the whole document at once.

Stylesare dozens of full-bleed mesh & gradient compositions with soft film-grain, across Minimal, Vibrant, Soft, Editorial, Dark, and Playful moods. The Colors control recolors any style four ways: the preset’s own palette, your brand colors, a curated palette (dozens of named color designs), or your own custom colors.

Patterns is a library of 60+ seamless motifs — grids, stripes, diagonals, chevrons, dots, rings, marks, geometric shapes, waves, and scallops. A pattern is an overlay layer you keep control of: place it behind, above, or over the current background — so you can drop a pattern on top of a Style or an AI background.

It stays live. Once a pattern is on the page, every control edits that pattern in real time — drag Pattern sizeand the motif on your design grows or tightens as you drag; the same goes for color, opacity, and placement. The panel always shows which motif you’re editing (it’s highlighted in the grid), so switching pages picks up that page’s pattern.

Move it. The Move X / Y sliders nudge the whole pattern around so you can line a motif up with your layout — handy for offsetting a grid off the page edge or centering a big graphic tile. Reset snaps it back. Every drag is a single undo step (⌘Z), so experimenting is safe. Remove just the pattern anytime, or clear the whole background.

Open the Background Lab to generate a one-of-a-kind full-bleed background with AI. Describe a vibe (or leave it blank), then choose two things: a Style — the look (aurora, gradient mesh, liquid chrome, editorial, organic, cinematic, minimal, geometric) — and a Concept, which controls howit’s rendered: Abstract, Illustration, Animated, 3D, Painterly, Texture, Line art, Collage, or Photographic. The two combine, so one style gives you many different results — ask for “aurora” as a soft abstract wash, or the same aurora as a flat illustration. Theo composes it at your page’s proportions and sets it as the page background.

Backgrounds are always designed to sit behind your content: Theo keeps them full-bleed and evenly weighted, and never puts people, text, or a framed subject in them. Every background you make is saved automatically to My backgrounds in the AI tab, so you can reapply or delete it anytime — no need to regenerate.

From the dashboard: click + New → Page Doc (or open Theo Pages from the sidebar) and pick a template, a blank size, or upload a document to convert.

From Theo Chat:ask for a designed document (“make me a flyer for our summer sale”, “design a one-page resume”) and Theo lays out a real, editable page doc you can open from the chat card.

From a file: drop a PDF, Word document, or image onto the create screen and Theo converts it into editable pages — text becomes text boxes you can restyle, not a flat picture.

Page docs live in your Library like every other project — star them, move them into folders, and reopen them anytime.

Click any element to select it, drag to move, pull the handles to resize, and grab the rotate handle to spin it. Snap guides light up when you line up with the page center, edges, fold lines, or other elements — while youresize as well as while you move, so you can pull an edge flush to something instead of eyeballing it. A live width × heightreadout follows the handle you're dragging. Shift-click or drag a marquee to multi-select, and double-click any text to edit it in place.

The left dock holds everything you can add: templates and page sizes (Design), shapes, lines, and icons (Elements), text presets from display headlines to captions (Text), your uploaded images (Uploads), and your brand palette and fonts (Brand).

A massive element library: the Elements tab now spans four sub-libraries — nearly 500 design shapes (searchable, across Basic Geometry, Stars & Badges, Arrows & Pointers, Callouts & Banners, Frames & Borders, Symbols & Objects, Decorative & Abstract, and a shaded 3D objects pack — cubes, spheres, pyramids, stairs, coins, gems, extruded arrows and more that recolor like any other shape), an Icons browser over the full 1,600+ icon set with curated categories, a 790+ emoji library with a skin-tone selector that retints every hand and person emoji, and Giphy-powered GIFs (animated in the editor — PNG/PDF exports use a still frame).

Lines you can design:the Lines shelf ships 36 ready-made designs — arrows, dividers, dotted and dash-dot rules, curves, elbows, zigzags, and waves. Select any line and the toolbar's Line popover becomes a line designer: pick the path (straight, curved, elbow, zigzag, wavy), the dash style, a bend amount, and independent start/end caps (arrow, triangle, dot, ring, square, diamond, bar) — then rotate for any angle.

Make your own emoji:the Emoji section's Make your own strip generates custom emoji stickers with AI — describe anything, pick a style (3D, Flat, Pixel, Clay), keep your chosen skin tone, and optionally cut the background out so it drops onto the page as a clean sticker.

Hundreds of designed text combos: the Text tab opens a searchable, browsable library of 300+ ready-made text designs — editorial kickers, bold posters, badges, pull quotes, price tags, and more — composed over 120 curated heading/body pairings across ten style categories (Editorial, Elegant, Modern, Bold, Minimal, Playful, Tech, Retro, Handwritten, Luxury). Filter by category, toggle Styled only, and click any combo to drop the whole cluster onto the page. The toolbar's font picker still reaches the entire Google Fonts catalog.

Text effects: select any text and open Effects for a searchable library of 200+ styles — see the Text Effects Studio below.

Theo Type: type a phrase and a design idea and Theo Type generates unique, designed text clusters — pairing fonts, effects, and layout for you — that you insert with one click and restyle like anything else.

The context toolbar adapts to your selection. For text you get the font picker, a font size you can type into, text color, B / I / U / S, an UPPERCASE toggle, horizontal and vertical alignment, a Spacing control (letter spacing, line height, text-box fill and padding), and Effects. Shapes get fill, gradient, stroke, and corner radius; images get Filters, fit, and radius; lines get the line designer. Everything shares the common cluster: transparency, flip and rotate 90°, Shadow, Position, Layers, lock, comment, duplicate, delete, and a “⋯” menu with copy/paste style, links, and alt text.

Undo & redo:the arrows next to the document name step back and forward through your edits, and they grey out when there's nothing left to undo or redo, so you can always tell where you are. ⌘Z undoes and ⇧⌘Z redoes. A whole drag, resize, or rotation is one step — not a hundred tiny ones — and whatever you had selected stays selected afterwards.

Pages:add, rename, reorder, duplicate, hide, or delete pages from each page's hover row.

Select anything and click Shadow in the toolbar. It works on everything — headlines, photos, cut-out stickers, shapes, lines, and icons — not just images.

Drag the light.Instead of picking “Small / Medium / Large” from a menu, drag the puck around the dial to aim the shadow: where you drag is where it falls, and how far out you drag is how far it throws. The little square in the middle previews it as you go, and arrow keys nudge the direction (hold Shift for distance) when you want an exact angle.

Then dial it in: Distance and Blur for softness, Spread to thicken it into a halo, Transparency for weight, and any Color — including your brand colors, so a shadow can glow instead of darken.

Presets you can see. Twelve presets (Soft, Contact, Long, Hard, Halo, Neon…) sit in a scrollable strip of thumbnails above the dial, and each one previews on your own selected element — so you pick a look you can already see instead of a word. Glow presets preview on a dark card so the colour actually reads. Click one to apply it, then keep tuning.

It follows the real edge. A shadow traces the actual artwork, not the selection box — so a die-cut sticker casts around its silhouette, a triangle casts a triangle, letters cast letters, and a rounded or masked photo casts its rounded edge. The preview shows your real element, and every shadow exports exactly as shown in PNG and PDF.

A whole drag is a single undo step (⌘Z), and Copy style(⌥⌘C) carries shadows across element types — so you can lift a card’s shade onto a headline.

Select a photo and click Crop in the toolbar. Three tabs sit on one surface — Crop for reframing, Retouch for the AI edits, and Filters for the look (the same Filter Studio the Filters button opens).

Drag inside the photo to reframe it and drag the corners to change how much shows. The box on the page never moves— only what sits inside it changes — so cropping can't shove your layout around. Snap to an aspect (1:1, 4:5, 9:16, 1.91:1…) or stay free, and use Zoom to punch in. Past about 4× you get a nudge to check the photo still looks sharp at export size. Show the whole photo puts it back.

Nothing is thrown away: a crop is a view onto the same picture, so you can re-crop or undo it forever, and the filter and shadow you already set stay put.

• Remove background — cuts the subject out on a transparent background.
• Replace background— keeps the subject and rebuilds everything behind it from a description (“a sunlit marble countertop”).
• Erase & replace— say what to take out or change (“remove the car on the left”).
• Upscale — adds detail for large print or a tight crop.
• Expand — extends the photo outward to fill a wider frame.

Each one saves a new photo and keeps your frame, crop, and filter — the picture you placed is never overwritten, and Revert to originalappears once there is something to go back to. If an edit doesn't work out, the photo you had stays exactly where it was.

You can ask Theo instead: “cut the background out of the product photo”, “put her on a beach”, “upscale the hero image”, “put the original back”. Crop and retouch act on one photo at a time; filters apply to everything you have selected.

Select an image and click Filters in the toolbar. Every tile in the library shows your actual photo wearing that look — not a swatch and not a word — so you pick something you can already see. What the tile shows is exactly what exports.

Around 74 looks, searchable. Search by name or by what you want (“black and white”, “golden”, “film”, “moody”), or browse the seven categories: Essentials (mono, noir, fade, vivid), Warm (golden hour, amber, terracotta), Cool (arctic, blue hour, steel), Film (classic stock, faded print, cross process, bleach bypass), Mood (dramatic, dreamy, haze, velvet), Duotone (two-tone colour washes), and Bold (invert, high key, punch, heatmap).

Hold to compare. Press and hold the preview at the top of the panel to see the original underneath, then let go. Judging a subtle grade against the real photo beats trying to remember what it looked like before.

One Strength dial. Every look can be dialled from 0 to 100%, and it stays itselfat half power rather than turning into a different filter — so “a bit of Golden” is a real option. Your strength setting carries over when you try another look, so you can browse at the intensity you actually want.

Or tune it by hand. Open Adjust for Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Warmth, Desaturate, Sepia, Blur, and Invert, plus a colour wash — pick any colour (including your brand palette), set how strongly it sits over the photo, and choose how it blends. That is how you build a duotone in your own colours. A whole slider drag is a single undo step (⌘Z).

Filters apply to every image you have selected at once, and Copy style(⌥⌘C) carries a look from one photo to another. You can also ask Theo — “make the photos black and white”, “warm this up”, “remove the filter” — and it edits the same treatment the panel does.

Select text and click Effects. Search by name or by what you want (“neon”, “3d”, “chrome”, “stripes”, “marker”), or browse the nine categories:

• Shadow & depth — drop shadows in any direction, lifts, solid 3D extrudes, fading long shadows, emboss, engrave, and letterpress.
• Outline — hollow type from hairline to heavy, double outlines with a detached band, hollow-plus-shadow poster type, ghosted fills, and splice.
• Glow & neon — soft bloom, lit neon signs with a white-hot core, and auras that glow off the stroke only.
• Gradient & fill — two dozen named color ramps, hard-split duotones, and radial bursts painted through the letters.
• Metallic — chrome, steel, gold, copper, and graphite with a real reflection break.
• Textured — diagonal and pinstripe fills, hazard stripes, and halftone dot screens.
• Retro & pop — offset colour plates, misregistered print, and chromatic glitch.
• Playful — sticker chips and marker highlights that sweep behind the words.
• Editorial — restrained treatments that still read at body-copy sizes.

Controls that name themselves. Once a style is applied you only get the knobs it actually uses, labelled for what they do: an extrude has Depth, a long shadow has Length, a marker has Band height, chrome has separate midtone, shadow, and highlight colors. Nothing shows a slider that does nothing.

Every preview is the real thing — the same renderer the canvas and exports use — and glow styles preview on a dark card so you can actually see them. Effects survive PNG/PDF export; email export flattens them and tells you so.

Flip works on everything — shapes, headlines, arrows, lines, icons, and photos. Hit ⇧H to mirror left-to-right or ⇧Vtop-to-bottom, or use the flip buttons in the toolbar, on the floating bar above your selection, in Position → Transform, or under right-click → Transform. That's how you point an arrow the other way or face a curve back into the layout — mirroring is not the same as rotating.

Flip a whole selection and it really flips. Two things side by side swap sides, rather than each one mirroring where it stands — so a mirrored lockup still reads as the same lockup. A tilted element leans the other way afterwards, which is what a mirror does.

Grab the handle above any selection and turn it. It settles onto 15° stepswhen you're close to one, and holding Shift turns snapping off so a deliberate 7° tilt is yours to keep. A live degree readout follows the drag, so you can see exactly where you are.

Groups turn too. Select several things (or a group) and the bounding box gets its own rotate handle — the whole arrangement turns together instead of each piece spinning on the spot. ⇧R quarter-turns clockwise, ⇧⌥R the other way, and ⌥ + ←/→ nudges a degree at a time (hold Shift for 15°). Resizing a rotated element now follows your pointer along its ownedges, and the corner you aren't dragging stays exactly where it is.

Hold ⌥ (Alt) and drag: a copy stays behind and you carry the original away — the fastest way to build a row of badges or a repeating pattern. Then ⌘D repeats that same spacing again and again, so the third and fourth copies land on the same rhythm instead of a fixed nudge. ⌥⌘D drops a copy exactly on top, for when you want to change one thing and compare.

Position → Arrange has typed W, H, X, Y, and rotation, with a Lock-ratio toggle. With several things selected those numbers describe the whole selection: typing an X slides the group there and keeps its internal spacing, and a new width scales the block — it no longer stacks everything onto one point. Drag a bounding-box corner to scale proportionally (type included) or an edge to stretch one direction only, which leaves font sizes alone.

Lines: right-click a line for Reverse direction — it swaps the two ends, so an arrowhead moves to the other tip without you rebuilding the line.

Click Position in the toolbar to open a side panel with two tabs. Arrange handles layer order (bring forward / send backward / to front / to back), alignment, and exact numbers — width, height, X, Y, and rotation, with a Lock ratio toggle so resizing keeps the proportions.

Align, and you choose what to. The buttons sit in two labelled rows — Horizontal (left, centre, right) and Vertical(top, middle, bottom) — with a Page / Each other switch above them. That switch is the whole decision: Page puts every selected item against the page itself, so three things can all sit flush to the left margin; Each other lines them up within the selection and leaves the group where it is. Align is also on the right-click menu and on the floating bar above your selection, and ⌥⌘ + an arrow key aligns to that edge.

If centring would stack things, Theo Pages says so.Centring a row that sits side by side genuinely does put every item on the same centre line — that iswhat centring means — so instead of quietly doing something else, it does what you asked and tells you the row now overlaps, names the button you probably wanted, and ⌘Z is right there.

Text lines up by its words, not its box.A headline in a wide text box has its words over on one side, so lining up the boxes would move nothing you can see. Selecting text only lines up what's actually printed.

Two more actions appear for multi-selections: Space evenly(across or down — the outermost items stay put and every gap becomes equal) and Tidy up, which straightens ragged rows and evens out spacing. Tidy up is a cleanup, not a re-layout: it keeps the spacing you meant, so a label sitting tight under its value stays tight and a deliberate gap between two sections stays a gap. Nothing gets hoisted up the page and nothing is packed into a dense run.

The Layers tab is a full layer manager. Every element on the page is listed front-to-back with a live thumbnail, so you can find things by sight instead of by guessing. Click a row to select it, shift-click (or ⌘-click) to add to the selection, drag the grip to restack, and double-click a name to rename it.

Folders. Hit New folder to make one and drag layers in, or select a few things and press ⌘G — either way you get a named folder you can collapse out of the way. Folders nest: drag a row sideways to tuck it inside the folder above it, or use a folder's own New folder inside button. Grouping a few things that already live in a folder makes a sub-folder rather than yanking them out.

Hide and lock, per layer or per folder. The eye hides a layer everywhere — canvas, thumbnails, shared links, and PNG/PDF exports — which makes it a real way to park an alternate version instead of deleting it. The padlock leaves something visible but un-draggable. Set either on a folder and everything inside inherits it; the panel shows inherited state dimmed so you always know where it came from. ⇧⌘H and ⇧⌘L do the same for whatever is selected.

Shortcuts:⌘] and ⌘[ move forward and backward, ⌥⌘] and ⌥⌘[ jump to the front and back, and ⌘A selects everything on the page that isn't hidden or locked. On a long page, the filter box at the top of the Layers tab narrows the list by name.

Select two or more elements and press ⌘G (or use Position → Group, or right-click → Group). From then on, clicking any member selects the whole group, and it moves, duplicates, aligns, layers, and deletes as a single unit. ⇧⌘G ungroups.

Resize a group proportionally: a bounding box appears around any multi-selection or group — drag a corner and everything inside scales together, type included, so a whole lockup grows without falling apart.

Edit one piece: double-click a grouped element to step inside the group and work on that piece alone (double-click text again to edit the words). With nested folders each double-click goes one level deeper, and Esc steps back out one level at a time. Duplicating a group always creates an independent copy — folder names and nesting come along, but editing the copy never touches the original.

Where to group from: ⌘G and ⇧⌘G work anywhere, and Group / Ungroup also sit on the floating bar above your selection, in the right-click menu, and in the Layers tab. A selected group wears its name on the selection box, so you can tell a real folder apart from a here-and-now multi-select. Right-click also offers Move to folder to drop the selection straight into any folder on the page.

Right-click any element for the full menu: copy, duplicate, delete, group and ungroup, Layer and Align submenus, comment, link, lock, and — for images — alt text, Set as page background, and Replace with AI. Right-click the page itself to paste at that exact spot or jump to the background controls.

Copy a style, paste it anywhere: Copy style (⌥⌘C) lifts the whole look — font, size, weight, color, spacing, effects, fills, strokes, filters — without touching size or position, and Paste style (⌥⌘V) stamps it onto anything else, including several things at once. Pasting between different kinds of elements carries what makes sense (color and transparency).

The floating bar:a small toolbar hovers above whatever you've selected with the actions you reach for constantly — Ask Theo, lock, duplicate, delete, and “⋯” for the full menu.

Links: press ⌘K to make any element clickable — a web address or an email link. Links work in shared and published views; PDF and PNG exports are flat images, so they render the design without the click.

Documents open fit to the page — the entire design is visible the moment you land, whatever size it is. Fit stays live: open a panel, resize the window, or switch page size and the canvas re-fits itself.

The zoom pill sits in the bottom-right of the canvas: − and + step through zoom levels, and the middle button opens Fit page, Fill width, and preset percentages from 25% to 200%.

Shortcuts & gestures: ⌘+ and ⌘− zoom, ⌘0 fits the page, ⌘1 jumps to 100%, and pinching on a trackpad (or ctrl/⌘ + scroll) zooms around your pointer so you stay on the detail you're working on.

Open Elements → Shapes and hit Create to open the Shape Lab — a four-mode studio for designing your own shapes with a live preview, full undo/redo, and one-click insert.

Parametric: pick a family (star, polygon, flower, burst, rays, blob, scallop badge, or outline frame) and shape it with sliders — point counts, depth, corner rounding, rotation, ring width. Blobs are seeded, so the dice button rolls new organic shapes you can reproduce exactly.

Draw: sketch freehand and every stroke becomes clean filled ink — multi-stroke drawings stay arranged the way you drew them.

Pen: click to place points, double-click a point to curve it and drag its handles, and turn on mirror or radial symmetry to design one segment while the Lab completes the figure — snowflakes, pinwheels, and badges in seconds.

Combine: run true boolean operations — union, subtract, intersect — between your current shape and any library or saved shape, with offset and scale controls to position the second shape first. Results chain, so you can sculpt step by step.

My shapes: save anything you build to your personal library — it shows up at the top of the Shapes panel in every design. Inserted shapes are completely self-contained: they recolor, resize, and export exactly like built-in shapes, and shared copies keep working even if you later delete the saved original.

Every color swatch in the toolbar — text, text background, shape fill and stroke, lines, icons, and the page background — opens the same full color picker: search by name or hex, a spectrum and grid, an eyedropper, and your recent colors.

Smart sections: Document colors lists every color already used in your pages, Brand colors pulls from your brand palette and kits, and Photo colors extracts palettes from the images on your pages (or one you upload) so designs stay cohesive.

Gradients: shape fills and page backgrounds have a Solid | Gradient toggle — pick from curated presets or build your own linear/radial gradient with 2–6 stops, per-stop colors, and an angle control.

Change all: when a color appears in multiple places, the picker offers to swap every use across the document in one step — gradients included — with one undo.

Theo lives in a floating glass panel over your document — drag it anywhere, resize it from the edges, or collapse it to an Ask Theo pill. It sees your live pages on every message.

Ask for edits (“swap the headline and make it bigger”, “use a dark background with white text”, “add a page with our contact info”) and the changes apply straight to the canvas with a change list under the reply — the touched elements flash briefly so you can see exactly what moved, and ⌘Z reverts anything.

Select elements first and refer to them naturally — “make these bigger”, “center this” — and Theo applies the change to exactly what you selected.

Rewriting your words:Theo reads the real copy on your pages, so “punch up the headline”, “make this shorter”, or “rewrite this for parents, not teenagers” actually rewrites it. Your bold, italics, and links survive the rewrite, and names, dates, prices, and URLs come back exactly as you wrote them — Theo asks instead of inventing a detail it doesn't have.

Start fresh, or go back: the panel header has a New chat button and a historymenu. New chat gives you a clean slate on the same document — useful when you're changing direction and don't want the earlier back-and-forth steering things. The history menu lists your past conversations for this document (named after what you first asked) so you can pick one up again; nothing is deleted when you start a new one. Theo always sees the document you're editing either way — what a new chat clears is the conversation, along with any files or project you had attached.

Hit + in the composer to upload a file or attach a project— or just paste an image straight into the box. Photos and screenshots are the useful case: Theo looks at them and can place them on the page (“use this photo as the hero”, “make this the background”). PDFs, text, Markdown, CSVs, and spreadsheets are read for their content, so “lay out the pricing from this sheet” works. Attaching another project — a note, a deck, a flowchart — hands Theo that document as reference for copy and structure. Up to five files per message.

Video is reference only. Theo can watch a clip you attach and describe or design around it, but video is never placed onto a page.

The button on the right of the composer is a microphone while the box is empty — tap it and dictate. Your words are added to the message rather than sent, so you can keep talking, attach a photo, edit the wording, and then send when it's right. Once there's text in the box the same button becomes Send.

Theo isn't limited to nudging what's already there. In one message it can generate images onto the page, drop in stickers from the library, add pages from a template, apply a background style or a whole design combo (palette + fonts), set your brand across the document, and align, distribute, or tidy upa messy layout. Ask for “the same background on every page” and it applies document-wide.

Tidy up understands the page. It leaves your full-bleed background where it is, straightens ragged rows onto a shared edge, keeps centered things centered on the page, holds the shape of a layout you've already composed (a footer stays a footer), keeps your tight spacing tight and your section breaks wide, and never pushes anything off the edge.

Your words never get cut off. A text box hides anything that doesn't fit, which used to mean a rewrite could end mid-sentence and still look fine. Now every change is measured before you see it: boxes grow to hold their copy, type steps down when there's nowhere left to grow, and anything below moves out of the way. It's in the change list, so you can see it happened — and if a box genuinely can't hold its words, Theo tells you instead of trimming them.

Ask it to clean something up — “polish this layout”, “tighten this up” — and Theo works from real measurements of your page rather than its own guess: edges that are two pixels off being level, gaps that are nearly but not quite even, copy that's overflowing. It fixes what was measured and leaves the rest of your design alone. On a small ask (“make the title blue”) it stays out of your layout entirely.

Ask for a whole piece — “design a flyer for our farmers market” — and Theo composes it rather than stacking your text down the middle of a white page. It picks a layout archetype (a full-bleed hero, a ribbon title, a diagonal split, a framed poster, a stamped badge, and more), commits to a background, lets something run off the edge, sets a real size jump between the headline and the fine print, and puts a key fact insidea shape — the hours in a ribbon, the price in a tag. It names the archetype it used in its reply, so “try the diagonal one instead” is a single follow-up. Starting on a blank document, it may begin from a matching template and rewrite it to your content.

A few things are never traded away for looks: your text stays inside the safe print margin, nothing gets clipped at the trim edge, text over a photo gets a scrim behind it so it stays readable, and a document sticks to two typefaces.

It stays honest about limits. Image generation is capped at a couple of renders per message, and if a sticker search, template, or render doesn't come through, Theo says so in the change list instead of quietly skipping it or inventing a picture that isn't there.

On a blank document the Theo panel leads with Design this for me. Describe the piece — include the real details, the names and dates and prices — and Theo composes the whole page as artwork first, the way a designer would, and then takes it apart so you get a document rather than a picture: the words become real text you can rewrite, and pieces of the artwork become layers you can move.

It runs for a minute or two, and the checklist shows you what it is genuinely doing at each step rather than a bar that fills up on a timer. You can keep working elsewhere while it finishes.

Your words come from your brief, never from reading the picture back.That is the difference between a flyer whose date says “May through October” and one that says “May Thirough October”. Theo already knows the facts you gave it, so it never has to guess them from the artwork.

Try a different look composes a fresh take in a deliberately different style. It is honest about what changes: the layout moves too, because the whole design is made again rather than recoloured.

Sometimes the text cannot be lifted off the artwork cleanly. When that happens Theo says so and gives you the design as a single layer instead of stacking real text on top of painted text and doubling every word. Designing it again usually fixes it. Either way ⌘Z puts your old document straight back.

Design quality varies between runs, the same way it does with any generated image — if the first one is crowded, ask again.

Anything still painted into a page's background can be pulled out of it. Right-click the page and choose Lift artwork out…, then click the thing you want — the illustration, the badge, the shape. It becomes a real layer you can move, resize, and re-order, and the space behind it is filled in so nothing is left showing through when you move it.

Click the object itself rather than dragging a box around it. If the selection grabs too much, click nearer its middle and try again; you stay in the mode, so a retry is one more click.

Repaint part of it…changes one patch of artwork from a description — “a bowl of ripe strawberries” over the basket that is there now. Only that patch changes; every other pixel stays exactly as it was, so text you have already positioned does not shift underneath you.

This works on any page with a background image, not just a generated one — so a photo you uploaded can have its subject lifted onto its own layer too.

Where the line is: lifted pieces and real text are fully editable. What remains of the background is still a picture — you can move it, mask it, replace it, or repaint parts of it, but it cannot be taken apart into individual shapes.

The dock's AI tab generates images directly into your document: describe what you want, pick a style preset (Photo, Filmic, Minimalist, Neon, 3D, Anime, Watercolor, Isometric, and more), choose an aspect ratio (or let it match the page), and hit Generate. The image lands on the current page as a normal element you can move, crop, filter, and layer.

Reference images: upload a reference and the render borrows its colors, mood, and style — without copying it literally.

Replace with AI:select any image and use the toolbar's Replace with AI action — the new render drops into the exact same position and size, so your layout never moves. Generated images are watermark-free and print-safe.

The size picker includes every static placement worth designing for: Instagram post (1080×1350, 4:5 — the tallest shape the feed allows, so it takes the most screen), square (1080×1080), Story / Reel (1080×1920), TikTok (1080×1920), landscape (1080×566), and Facebook link (1200×628).

TikTok is the same canvas as a Reel but not the same design: TikTok keeps a column of buttons down the right-hand edge that Reels does not, and Reels covers much more of the bottom. Neither one is “inside” the other, which is why they are separate sizes — and why there is a third option for one creative that has to run on both.

The Adstemplate category has fifteen layouts that consistently work, each built for all four vertical and square shapes: a product hero, problem → solution, a customer quote, one big stat, a three-benefit list, a this-vs-that comparison, a full-bleed bold statement, an offer with a deadline, a before & after, a product with callouts, a stack of reviews, a founder quote, a single review card, a lifestyle shot, and a restrained editorial layout. They are laid out onthe safe area rather than trimmed to it afterwards, so the button and the price never land under the app's own interface.

Every layout comes written for 24 industries — restaurants, dentists, clinics, estate agents, garages, solicitors, gyms, salons, jewellers, travel, events, pet food, supplements, software, apparel, skincare, coffee, finance, trades, courses, apps, agencies, and charities — so searching for your business finds something that already says roughly the right thing. Every number in that copy carries its source, because an unsourced statistic reads as invented.

On an ad canvas the toolbar gains a Safe area guide that shades the strips Instagram and Facebook draw their own chrome over, and counts anything readable sitting under them. It is editor-only — it never appears in an export, a thumbnail, or a share link.

Vertical ads default to Stories + Reels, which is safe on both of Meta's vertical surfaces. Switch to TikTok to free up roughly 210px at the bottom in exchange for keeping ~120px clear down the right edge, to Reels + TikTok for the tightest option that is safe on both platforms at once, or to Stories only if the ad will never run on Reels and you want the extra ~290px at the bottom. Each option says what it costs you. On feed sizes the guide is advisory margins rather than a hard overlay — nothing is genuinely covered there, it just looks cramped when type runs to the edge.

The same dropdown runs a quick read on the design: one clear call to action (not none, not four), a headline that is genuinely bigger than everything else, nothing readable hidden under the interface, and enough of the frame left to the image. Warnings that actually cost you a click are highlighted; the rest are quiet notes. To be clear about one myth: Meta dropped its hard 20% text rule in 2020 — nothing here is rejected for text coverage, but an ad buried in copy still performs worse, which is what this flags.

Click Ad setin the header and Theo adapts the page you are on to every other placement: type scales off the shorter edge, corner logos stay in their corners, full-bleed art re-covers the new frame, and anything that would land under the app's chrome is moved clear. Each placement previews right in the dialog with a note about anything it could not place — it tells you rather than quietly cropping.

Pick the ones you want and Download — you get a zip of correctly-sized PNGs, one per placement. Want to hand-tune one? Open as its own design spins that placement into a separate document. Your original is never touched: adapting happens at download time, so no extra pages appear in the design you are working on.

The Brand tab is a persistent Brand Studio: create brand kits that live in your workspace across every document. Each kit holds up to four named palettes, your logos, heading/body fonts, and up to four uploaded custom fonts (TTF, OTF, WOFF, WOFF2) — your real typefaces render in the editor, for collaborators, and in exports.

Fill a kit fast:paste your website URL to extract colors, fonts, and your logo in one click, or extract a palette from any photo. Logos upload into the kit — click one to place it on the page, or star it as the document's brand logo.

Apply kit writes the kit onto the document and restyles every brand-tagged element at once, and Brand sheet appends designed pages — a color-palette board with hex labels plus type specimens and your logo — ready to share as brand guidelines.

A quick-edit section below still tweaks just this document's palette and fonts without touching your kits.

The Design panel's Styles section is a gallery of curated palette + font combinations across eight moods — Professional, Vibrant, Earthy, Pastel, Dark, Luxury, Retro, and Tech — with your brand kits pinned first. Click one and the whole document restyles: brand-tagged colors and heading/body fonts update across every page, with one undo. Shuffle deals a fresh hand, and See all opens the full browser with search and category filters.

The combo library (540+): hit Browse all design combos and a dedicated library panel opens beside the dock — 540+ palette × typography combinations built from 120 curated color palettes and the font-pairing registry. Search, filter by mood, shuffle, and keep loading more; clicking any combo applies it to the whole document instantly, and the panel stays open so you can try looks back-to-back.

My styles: hit Save currentto capture this design's colors and fonts as your own named style — it syncs with your Brand Studio kit, works across every document, and you can rename or delete saved styles right from the gallery.

With Drive enabled on your workspace, the Uploads tab becomes a real asset manager: images you upload land in a Design assets folder in your Drive with a subfolder per project, so every design keeps its own library — and it all counts against your Drive storage, in one place.

Browse across projects: the folder switcher jumps between this design's assets, your other projects' folders, and every image in Drive — pull an asset from any project into the current page, or move it into this project's folder. Rename and trash files right from the panel, or open Drive for the full manager.

Sharing-safe embeds: placed images use a revocable viewer link, so collaborators, share-link guests, and exports always see them — revoke the file's link in Drive and it disappears everywhere.

Images you have already made or saved elsewhere in Theo show up here too. The From your Canvas row in the Uploads tab lists your Canvas asset library — click one to drop it straight onto the page, no re-uploading and no download-then-upload round trip.

It goes the other way as well: after you generate an image on the AI tab, a Save to library action puts that render in the same library so it is available in your next design. It is a deliberate click rather than automatic — most generations are throwaway attempts, and filing all of them would bury the ones you actually kept.

On the create screen, drop in a PDF, DOCX, PPTX, or image (up to 20MB). Theo reads the document and rebuilds it as structured, editable pages — headings, body text, and layout — ready to restyle.

Conversion is a redesign, not a photocopy: Theo preserves your content and structure while laying it out cleanly on real pages. Complex artwork may be simplified — a notice tells you when something didn't survive the trip.

Picking a file opens a short brief instead of designing straight away, because "redesign this" on its own leaves every real decision — colour, type, mood, imagery — to Theo. Write what the document is for("a recruiting one-pager, lead with the headline, keep every date exactly as written"), pick the brand it belongs to, choose a feel — Professional, Vibrant, Earthy, Pastel, Dark, Luxury, Retro, or Tech — and say how any imagery Theo creates should look.

Your brand, actually applied: choose one of your Brand Studio kits and its exact colours and fonts go into the design, not an approximation of them — and the finished document carries that brand, so the Brand tab, the Styles pickers and every later Ask Theo turn already know it. No saved brand yet? Start from one of the 540+ design combos instead. It is one or the other: a brand wins outright, so a style underneath it would do nothing.

Direction changes the look, never the facts: a mood or a style is never licence to shorten a paragraph, drop a price, or reword a date. If you would rather not fill anything in, Just import it is always one click away.

Click Share in the header to invite people by email as a viewer, commenter, or editor— or copy a share link. Collaborators show up as presence avatars in the header, and you'll see each other's selections outlined in their color right on the pages. Viewers get a clean, read-only canvas with Export still available.

Edits merge automatically: everyone's changes save on their own and combine without interrupting you. If a teammate saves while you have unsaved work, both sets of changes are kept — they were almost certainly editing different things, and each element keeps whichever version was actually touched. There's no banner and nothing to choose. If two people edit the exact same element at the same moment, the person still working on it wins.

Deleting also plays it safe: if you remove something a teammate is actively editing (or the other way round), the edit wins and nothing disappears mid-thought. A remote change never yanks a text box you're typing in — it waits until you're done.

Comments: press Cor click the comment icon in the header to open the panel. Select an element first and your new thread pins to it — elements with open threads show a small dot, and clicking a thread jumps you to its spot on the page. Resolve threads when they're done.

Open the header's ⋯ menu → Save as template to save the whole document — pages, elements, and brand styles — into your personal template library. Your saved templates appear under My templatesin the editor's Design panel and on the create screen, and applying one always starts a fresh copy so the original stays untouched.

Exportin the header opens the export studio with a live preview of what you'll get. PNG is lossless and supports transparency, JPG is the smallest option for photo-heavy designs, WebP gets you the best size-to-quality ratio for the web, and PDF assembles every page into one file at exact page dimensions — so Letter stays 8.5 × 11 in and A4 stays 210 × 297 mm. Email-sized documents also offer Email HTML with live text.

A PDF is finished; a Word file is something you can keep working on. Pick Word and you get real, editable text — not a picture of your design. There are two ways to do that, and the studio lets you choose:

Exact layout keeps every element exactly where you put it. Each text box becomes a real Word text box you can retype, restyle and spell-check, positioned to the pixel. Shapes, icons, lines, gradients, text effects and page backgrounds have no Word equivalent, so they come across as artwork behind your text at whichever quality tier you picked. This is the one to use when the design matters.

Flowing documentturns the page into an ordinary Word document instead: real headings, paragraphs, bullet and numbered lists, side-by-side columns as tables, and images placed inline with one-inch margins. It won't look like your design — it reflows as you type, like any document. Use it for reports, one-pagers, resumes and menus you plan to keep writing.

Two things Word does its own way. Fonts aren't embedded, so Word substitutes any typeface the person opening the file doesn't have installed — the artwork keeps your real fonts, live text may not. And Word breaks lines using its own measurements, so a tight text box can wrap differently than it does here; Exact layout gets the box position and size right, but the text inside it is Word's. If either matters, export a PDF as well.

Word also caps a page at 22 inches. Very large pieces like an 18 × 24 in poster are scaled down to fit, and the studio tells you when that happens — export PDF to keep the full size.

Four tiers, and the studio always shows the exact pixel size and DPIyou're about to get: Web (96 DPI, smallest file), HD (192 DPI — the sweet spot for screens and social), Print (a true 300 DPI, so a Letter page exports at 2550 × 3300 px), and Maximum — the largest image your browser can actually render for that page size.

Browsers cap how big a single image can be, and the cap is lower on Safari and iPhone/iPad than on Chrome. Rather than quietly handing you a smaller file (or a blank one), the studio reduces the tier and tells you it did. Very large pieces like posters may therefore max out below 300 DPI on some devices — export from a desktop browser when you need the absolute maximum.

Export all pages, just the page you're on, or a typed range like 1-3, 5. Multi-page image exports arrive as a single .zip by default. PNG and WebP can drop the page background for a transparent export; JPG and WebP get a quality slider; and PDF lets you pick Print (lossless, sharpest type) or Compact (a much smaller file at the same resolution — ideal for email). You can also Copy image straight to your clipboard, and cancel a long export at any point.

Open Export → Share link and hit Create share link. You get a copyable URL that opens your design on its own hosted page — anyone with the link can view it and download it in any format, without signing in or creating an account.

The hosted page shows the real design, page by page, with Download and Copy link built in. It's view-only: nobody can edit your document, and the link never exposes your other projects.

You stay in control. Reopen the tab any time to copy the link again or Revoke it — revoking takes effect immediately, and the link stops opening for everyone.