You don’t need to be an Adobe Photoshop pro or design expert to create unique, branded graphics for your digital screens. ScreenCloud’s new Canvas app lets you easily create screen-ready content inside ScreenCloud with all the design features you need to create content like digital posters, menus, announcements, digital signs, and images.

Best of all? Our Design Pros have created a Gallery of Templates that can be easily branded with your own colors and logos in a click, so you get tried and tested layouts for information sharing, notices, posters, and promotions. 

Canvas Templates - ScreenCloud

Here are some of the key features of the Canvas app, including the new Canvas Templates feature:

Create digital signage content in the correct screen format

Canvas presets your design size, optimizing it for a portrait or landscape screen format. No more black bars and easy-to-read digital signs that your audience will actually read. Our Gallery of Templates has been designed with screen best practices in mind. 

Design your custom brand with colors, images, logos, and shapes

Canvas’s superpower is ensuring every poster, sign, or notice you create is on-brand. With all the tools to add custom fonts, change colors and upload your brand assets with ease. Elements of your brand can also be locked down so that Creators and Editors can replace text or images without being able to change the layout or design. 

Re-use one design multiple times with Templates

No more design strain. Saving your Canvases as Templates in your Organization Templates for teams to reuse makes creating new, on-brand collateral and updating existing notices with the latest information, much easier. Perfect for local teams, or Marketing and HR Managers to create their own content. 

Add QR codes to your designs and collect their metrics

You can easily add a link as a QR code with your design, and the scans and metrics for this are collected in your account. A handy option if your company consists of deskless workers.

1. Open ScreenCloud’s Canvas App editor tool

1.1. Get started by logging into your ScreenCloud account and choosing the ScreenCloud Canvas panel from the left-hand menu. 

1.2. Choose which type of Canvas you want to create

There are four key options for what you can do within Canvas.

Use one of your organization's existing Templates or a Template from the Gallery

In the next steps, we’ll walk you through each of the four options for how to create, save and reuse digital signage templates for your screens. 

2.1. To start designing a new Canvas from scratch select the “New Canvas” button.

Here, you can rename your Canvas and choose from a landscape or portrait design depending on the format of your screen.

There are a variety of design options available for editing and customizing your Canvas template. We’ll explain a little more about how these work below.

2.2. Selecting “Text” will prompt a window for you to type in anything you’d like to appear on your Canvas. Canvas has 32 Google fonts already available for you to choose from and there’s also an option to upload your own custom font to ensure your text looks brand. 

Using the right-hand tool panel, you can customize how your text appears by changing the alignment/positioning, font type, color, and size. This also provides the ability for you to reduce the opacity of your text.

You can reposition any text by dragging and dropping it anywhere on your template. You can also resize the text field by pressing and holding your mouse click while moving your mouse toward the center of a text field, or expanding from the corners to make it larger.

2.3. You can upload photos and images directly into your Canvas using the Media Picker tool. Grab your brand logos or images from sources like Dropbox, or directly from your “Media Library" in ScreenCloud.

Top tip: Having your logos and any other brand elements saved in your Media Library will make it faster for you to create new Canvases. 

You can reposition an image by dragging and dropping it anywhere on your template. You can also increase or decrease the opacity of your image.

2.4. You can also easily crop your images within Canvas, as well as easily set them into a shape.

2.5. You can easily add shapes to your design. The current shapes available include Circles, Rectangles, Squares, Triangles, and Pentagons. This is a great way to create an image background or badge, to help different elements stand out within your design.

You can change the color and size of shapes into any format you like and again, change the opacity of your shape.

2.6. Click and use the tool to change your background color for the template. You can also refer to websites such as https://htmlcolorcodes.com to quickly reference an HTML color code to ensure your background color remains on-brand.

2.7. Upload an image to use as your template background by clicking “Use Image”.

2.8. As well as the right-hand toolbar there is also a lower panel features bar (see image below) that lets you take specific actions such as undoing and redoing an action and duplicating a layer or element. 

i) Undo and redo actions: you can use these arrows to undo or redo any recent actions made to your template.

ii) Duplicate content: select a piece of content (e.g. text, image, etc.) to duplicate the item.

iii) Delete content: select a piece of content (e.g. text, image, etc.) to delete the item.

iv) Ability to cut, copy, and paste: similar to commands on your computer or alternative photo editing tools, you can right-click any item in the template to quickly cut, copy, and paste any item.

Here’s an overview of computer commands you can use in Canvas, respective to your platform (e.g. Windows or macOS):

Locking elements of your Canvas design for future templates

2.9. As part of Canvas templates, we’ve made it possible for you to lock elements of the original design. This allows other team members or locations to reuse templates, without them changing the fundamental design elements of your brand. 

To lock an item, simply select it and choose the padlock icon from the right-hand side menu. Template elements can be locked by any Manager or Admin within an account.

When a Creator selects that template to use, they can replace images or edit the text but won’t be able to move or change the positioning of the layer, thereby keeping all of your screen communications on brand. 

In this sample, you can see while using Canvas that a user with Administrator or Manager permissions can access the lock-icon to control assets in the editor. 

In this sample, you can see while using Canvas that a user with Creator permissions cannot access the lock-icon or feature to control asset designs within the editor. 

2.10. If you wish to share a website or an online form, you can attach this as a QR code to your design for very easy access for any smartphone users. The code comes in black or white, and can also be placed with a transparent background.

You should adjust it according to your screen size and how far the screen is from your viewers.

When a QR code is scanned, the statistics are collected in Metrics. Any QR code generated within Studio and it's apps will appear here, according to which screen was scanned by the viewer.

2.11. With the Canvas app, you can also resize your graphics and designs at any time using the "Resize Canvas" button on the right-hand menu. 

Once this is selected, you can change the resolution and also the sizing of your Canvas design. You can select from the options available from the drop-down menu or use "Custom" for your own sizing. You can review the brief animation below which shows an example of how you can resize your Canvas design.

Once you’ve created your Template you can easily choose to save it as a template for others to reuse. Please note, only Admins and Managers have the ability to select which Canvases become templates. 

3.1. Save your template by selecting the “Save” button in the top right-hand corner. 

3.2. Now navigate to the “My Canvases” section and next to your new Canvas, Select the Option key and choose “Save As Template”. This will save the design as a Template that everyone within your Space will be able to access going forward.

Other uses can now find that Template within the “Templates” section of the account.

Once saved you’ll see that anytime you go to make further edits on one of your Canvas Templates you’ll see the blue “Template Editor” badge. This is a good reminder that any changes you make to this core Template will be reflected in all accounts within that Space so only do this if you want to make a permanent change. 

3.3. To make changes to that Template, visit Templates > My Templates and select either “Edit Template” or “Duplicate” to edit or create a new version of the same template.

The Canvas App follows the same minimum file size and upload requirements for the ScreenCloud platform. Please refer here for ScreenCloud’s file type limits and requirements.

Yes - The best practices for using the ScreenCloud Canvas app are to:

Optimise your images. Prior to uploading your images to Studio, use a free image compressor site such as tinypng.com to drastically reduce the size of each image.

Limit the number of images per canvas. Reducing the amount of imagery on each canvas will reduce the overall size of it, making it quicker to load on screen. This can also help simplify the design, making it easier for the viewer to digest.

Beware of the hidden imagery. If duplicating a canvas or template, remember to remove any unrequired imagery that may be hidden behind other images or layers as they will increase the file size.

To remove the ScreenCloud made Canvas templates in the template gallery, you can toggle off the "ScreenCloud Canvas Template Gallery" switch, found under Feature Settings under the Organization tab under Account Settings. This will remove or hide the ScreenCloud Canvas template gallery from all spaces in your organization.

Canvas App can work with customized dimensions sizing, in addition to traditional landscape and portrait screen sizes (16:9 and 9:16). This is available when you create a new Canvas App instance to use a pre-formatted size or add your own pixel sizes. Please note, using multi-zone layouts is not fully supported for resizing Canvas App at this time (e.g. if your pixel sizing is a different ratio to your zone layout, you may not get a perfect fit).

There’s no limit while using the Canvas app. You can add as many instances and customize any number of graphics you’d like.

The Canvas App currently does not support .gif or animation file types.

Yes, you can lock assets and also set up permissions using ScreenCloud's People, Groups, and Spaces feature to control how users interact with your Canvas designs. For example, using this feature you can manage roles for your account and specific roles can help you lock down your creations. If an administrator or manager locks a Canvas asset in a design, only these two roles can unlock and manage the assets. However, if a creator (or any other permission-based user) tried to unlock or edit the assets they will not have access to do so.

Canvas lets you customize fonts and colors and upload your brand assets with ease. Edit our pre-made templates, or create your own from scratch. 

Save your designs as templates for your team to work from, and enable different permission levels across Canvas templates to lock or repurpose images for your teams and locations. 

Lock-down elements of your brand so that assets can be re-used without being re-designed. Plus, edit designs and publish from anywhere. 

Canvas app makes it easier than ever to create great-looking screen content like posters and digital menu boards. Choose from our templates, or create your own, and design digital signage content that is always on-brand. 

Canvas app makes it easier than ever to create beautiful digital signage content like posters and digital menu boards in both portrait and landscape screen formats, all from within the ScreenCloud software.

Canvas - Digital Signage Design Editor - ScreenCloud

Create branded visual content, designing customizable displays from templates.

How it works:

How it works:

1. Hardware

2. Software

3. Support & Services

Industries

Case Studies

Content

Canvas

Included in all plans

About this app

Always on-brand

Easier team collaboration

Editable and locked templates

Frequently asked questions

Is there a maximum file size limit for uploading images into the Canvas App?

Are there any best practices for using the Canvas app?

How can I display just my organizations Canvas templates and remove or hide the Canvas templates from ScreenCloud?

Does the Canvas App work with custom dimensions?

Which file types are supported to upload and use with the Canvas App?

Is there a limit on the number of graphics I can create with the Canvas App?

Can I use videos or animations (.gif) files with the Canvas App?

Can I lock assets and graphics used in a Canvas editor to lock down designs?

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