The complete handbook

Gridform is a creative studio you brief. Tell it what you are making and it develops a direction, builds the work, and adapts it across whatever you need next — a poster, a campaign, a film, a brand world, the assets around them. Underneath sits a disciplined design system — a column grid, a modular type scale, a small set of colour roles — plus hundreds of starting layouts and generative exploration. The result stays tasteful because type sizes always come from the scale and positions snap to the grid.

From brief to finished work

Most creative software begins by assuming you already know what you are making. Gridform starts earlier. Give it the objective and it helps develop the direction, explore possibilities, create the work, refine it and prepare it to ship. The canvas is no longer the starting point — the idea is.

One studio, five creative surfaces. Design creates the visual work. Video brings ideas into motion. Campaigns turn one idea into an entire campaign. Brand builds the visual world around it. Assets create everything needed to ship. They are not five separate products — they are five faces of one studio, sharing your content, your palette, your type and your brand.

The one idea that matters

Your poster is rendered as a single inline SVG built from a plain data model. That same SVG is the source of truth for the live preview and for every export. There is no second render path and nothing is screenshotted, so what you see is exactly what you get — at any resolution, in any format.

Private by design

Everything you create lives in your browser. There is no account and no sign-up, and your work is saved locally on your device. Nothing leaves your machine unless you choose an action that needs the network — using an AI feature with your own key, or fetching a stock image. Exports and shared links never contain your keys.

Who it's for

• Anyone making a poster fast — start from a layout, type your copy, shuffle until it sings, export.
• Designers who want control — a real grid, a baseline, OpenType typography, masks, print marks, and true-vector PDF.
• Teams keeping things on-brand — a brand system, reusable looks, and channel resizing.

Open the app and you already have a finished poster on the canvas. From here you can make it yours in under a minute.

Start a poster (the front door)

New ▸ Start a poster takes a light brief — what it's for (event, product, editorial, exhibition…), your headline — and answers with six designed alternates, each quality-checked. Hover any tile to re-roll just its colour, type, or layout; pin favourites to the tray; compare two-up; click one to start from it. Lock chips let you hold the palette or the type while everything else moves.

Your first poster

1. Open the Content tab in the left rail and replace the placeholder text — a title, a subhead, some meta. The layout reflows as you type.
2. Press S to shuffle the style, or open Design → Looks and click a preset to restyle in one tap. In Design → Style, Generate derives a fresh palette in one of eight house recipes, From image builds one around your photo, and every role — including Muted — has its own row.
3. Pick a Format (a print size or a social size) if you need something other than the default poster.
4. Review, then ship: the Review tab grades the design (with three advisory taste meters — colour voice, air, optical balance), Auto-Perfect applies every safe fix, and the Publish Gate checks every page before export.
5. Press ⌘E to export — choose PNG, SVG, or a print-ready PDF.

The interface

Saving, undo, and sharing

• Autosave keeps your work in the browser as you go — and the lamp in the top bar tells the truth about it: if storage is full it reads "Not saved on this device" instead of failing silently.
• Rolling backups land in browser database storage beside the regular save — including a safety version the moment a new document or project replaces your work. Restore any of them from the Time machine; a restore is itself reversible. If the app ever reopens older than your last edits, a one-line banner offers the newer backup.
• Undo / redo with ⌘Z and ⌘⇧Z; copy · cut · paste · select‑all for objects with ⌘C ⌘X ⌘V ⌘A — pastes work across pages and fan out neatly.
• Selection toolbar — select any object (or several) and align, distribute, duplicate, flip, reorder or delete right above the canvas.
• Shapes — seven primitives plus a catalog of 1,000 generated vector shapes in twenty families; browse from the shape picker, swap geometry in place, and every entry stays native vector in every export.
• Share a design as a self-contained link or export the document to a file you can re-open. A poster too large for a link offers the file export instead of a truncated URL.

A few ideas run through the whole product. Understanding them makes everything else click.

Layouts are data

Every layout is a small data object describing where things go on a grid — not a fixed picture. That is why a layout can carry your copy, adapt to a new format, and be shuffled, bred, or interpolated without ever breaking.

The grid & the type scale

Positions snap to a column grid with margins, gutters, and a baseline. Type sizes come from a modular scale — a ratio applied in steps, so sizes relate to one another instead of being arbitrary. Keeping size on the scale and position on the grid is what keeps even randomised output looking intentional.

Colour roles

Instead of hard-coded colours, elements reference roles: paper (background), ink (primary text), muted (secondary), and accent. Swap a palette and every element re-colours correctly, because each one knows its job rather than its hex value.

Slots vs. free objects

Seeds & locks

Randomness is deterministic: a seed always produces the same result, so you can reproduce a design exactly. Locks let you freeze what you like — layout, palette, fonts, finish — and shuffle only the rest.

The Templates tab is your starting point: a large, curated library of poster layouts spanning editorial, directory, hero-image, type-led, and grid styles. Browse, search by tag, and click to apply your content to a new structure instantly.

The Signature collection

The Signature chip at the top of the layout picker gathers fourteen compositional families designed and quality-gated to the library’s highest bar — staircase reading paths, annotation rails, colossal-versus-whisper scale duets, overlapping colour planes, banded rhythms, justified text slabs, carved whitespace, single-seam alignment, perimeter type rings, restated title registers, photo wells, crossing bands, corner pinwheels, and stepped skylines. Every one grades Excellent with legible type and clean composition before it ships, and each is marked with a small ◆ in the grid.

Social templates & the Social family

For modern software brands there’s a curated Social library: hundreds of ready-to-post templates browsable by use-case — Company, Product, Partnership, Growth, Events, Community, Hiring, Education, Customer Stories, Social Proof, Thought Leadership, and Brand — in every feed and story size (1:1, 4:5, 9:16). Open them from Create → Templates and filter by group, style, and format; each opens as a complete, editable poster. They’re built on a Social family of 192 use-case-tuned compositions (hero, split, bento, big-number, quote, list, band, frame, stack, corner, column, type-as-image, photo, grid, ticket, and tall story layouts) and a set of 24 modern colour systems in the Looks rail. Every template and layout clears the same quality gate as the rest of the library before it ships.

Ways to get a layout

Content-aware relayout

Layouts adapt to what you give them. Add more copy and text reflows; change the format and the structure re-fits the new proportions instead of stretching. You stay in control — the engine just keeps the composition coherent.

The Design tab is where a poster gets its personality — palette, type pairing, scale, finish, and accent all live here.

Looks

Looks are one-tap aesthetic presets. Each one combines a palette, a font pairing, an optional print finish, and an optional motion preset. There are signature looks plus families organised by mood — neutral, editorial, vivid, dark, warm, cool, pastel, bold, and more — so you can change the entire feel in a click. Save your current design as a custom look to reuse it.

The Style panel

• Scale — the modular ratio that governs type sizing.
• Type pairing — a display + text combination chosen to work together.
• Palette & accent — the colour set and the single highlight colour.
• Paint — fill text or backgrounds with a gradient or a pattern.
• Print finish — grain, halftone, riso, paper, photocopy, or duotone, with an intensity slider. Finishes are baked into the export so the file matches the preview.

Colour Lab

Open Mini Apps → Colour Lab to build palettes with live legibility grades and colour-blind previews (protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia, and grayscale), so your choices read clearly for everyone.

Slide Studio

A presentation, composed in the room it will be shown in. Create → Slide Studio is an editable deck of designed 16:9 (or 4:3) slides — the projection room, with the rail down the left wall, the working slide on a dark screen wall, and one inspector that shows exactly one thing at a time.

• Slides are designed, then unlocked. Every slide starts from a real composition — covers, section dividers, bulleted lists, headline figures, quotes, closings — and re-composes without ever losing a word. Flip on Free objects and you can drag, resize and rotate extra text, icons and marks right on the slide; one gesture is one undo step.
• Edit on the slide. Double-click any line to type into it in place — the words live in the slide, not in a slot, so re-rolling the composition can never strand them.
• Joins are a control. Between every pair of frames on the rail sits the join, drawn as what it does: cut, fade, push, cover, rise, or beam — a fade through dark, the projector blinking. Set one join or make it the deck default.
• Speaker notes are first-class — press N for the drawer, and the notes travel into the handout and the slides file.
• Present — press P for real fullscreen: arrow keys or click to advance, joins exactly as designed, notes on N, blackout on B. Reduced-motion preferences turn every join into a clean cut.

Deliver five ways from one manifest: a vector-first PDF deck (text stays selectable), numbered PNGs at exactly 1920×1080, a motion video with the same dwells and joins as Present, an A4 speaker-notes handout, and a .pptx slides file — each slide pixel-identical to the preview, with your notes as real, editable notes text. It opens on its own at #slides, and an older Slides / Deck list migrates in automatically the first time you open it, unchanged.

One panel, three tabs

The whole studio lives in one right-hand panel with three visible tabs — Write (the slide's words and photographs), Style (how this slide sits), and Deck (the presentation's design system). Nothing hides behind a keyboard chord; every tool is at most one visible click away. Selecting a grid slot, an object or a join swaps the panel for that one thing; pressing any tab brings you back.

The Deck tab

The deck's whole aesthetic, one section open at a time (D jumps straight to it). Everything here is deck-wide by design: change it once and all forty slides follow, in a single undo step.

• Looks — 134 complete aesthetics (palette, type pairing, print finish, entrance motion). Capture the deck's current look as your own Look and it joins the shelf.
• Theme — 21 curated themes, or edit paper / ink / muted / accent directly with a live contrast reading. Harmonies (complementary, analogous, triadic, split) build a palette from your accent. Resonance reads the deck's own words and dresses the theme for them.
• Type — scored pairings, the whole family library with live specimens, nine modular scales, and optional pixel / tracking / leading overrides on top of the scale.
• Surface — procedural motifs drawn as real vector inside the one SVG, print finishes, atelier relief lighting, and the backdrop gallery.
• Motion — 100 entrance choreographies as the deck default; any slide can override its own.
• Refine & Ready — the typographic refinements, a whole-deck re-roll, and the ready check.

Composing a slide

The strip above the slide carries the whole kit in one labeled row — Insert (text, shapes, icons, marks, blocks, photos) and Compose (Shuffle, Layouts, Explore, Mosaic, Perfect) with the live composition score as a lamp. Every move changes the composition only — palette, fonts and scale stay the deck's, whatever a roll proposes.

• Shuffle (S) re-rolls the current layout best-of-N; Vary (R) nudges the seed. Surprise reaches across the whole library.
• Browse… (L) opens the slide library — 200 compositions authored for the projected page, never posters squeezed into 16:9 — with this slide's own words already in them: what you see in a tile is exactly what applying it gives. Facet by best content match, by everything the slide can hold, or by purpose: Openers, Photo covers, Sections, Lists, Statements, Quotes, Figures, Photo fields, Compare, Steps, Closings, Press, Air.
• Explore… (V) offers eight strong variations in a direction — surprise, minimal, editorial, image-led. Mosaic… (B) composes the slide's own slots into a scored bento grid, with the weaver's panel and a live candidates board.
• Art direct makes the role-based emphasis moves; Perfect applies exactly the fixes the report flags. Lock composition keeps the layout still while style rolls carry on.
• [ and ] cycle the layout through the ranked shortlist without opening anything.

Slots, photos and inserts

• A slot is a control. Click any element on the slide to select its slot: a dashed frame, quick chips, and a panel with size, weight, case, alignment, leading, tracking and colour role — all on the deck's scale and palette, so a slide cannot drift out of the deck's voice. Drag a slot and it moves in whole grid cells, with the grid drawn while you drag. F flips, [/] reorder, ⌫ hides — hidden slots come back from the Slots list.
• Photos get the full darkroom: a focal viewfinder, zoom, frame, darken, blur, six treatments, five masks and a ten-channel grade. Place a photo pulls from this deck's shelf or from the image library you have built anywhere in the app — or just drag pictures from your desktop: onto the slide to place them there, onto any rail frame for that slide, or onto the rail's Add tile to make one slide per photo.
• Insert sits above the slide: text, 4 icon libraries, 2,000 generative marks, and 111 pre-composed section blocks (charts and tables among them).

Backdrops

The gallery holds 2,000 patterns, 12 generative fields and 200 abstract fields, every thumbnail drawn in your deck's own colours. Choose a ground for the whole deck or for one slide. What is stored is the recipe, never the picture: the image is baked on your device, cached, and re-baked automatically if you re-theme — so a dressed forty-slide deck still saves in a fraction of a second. A slide set to an ink or accent tone drops the deck's ground on purpose (a paper-toned pattern under a dark slide is unreadable); give that slide its own backdrop and it wins the ground back.

Ready check

Press the score in the status bar, or open it from the dock, for a per-slide grade with the exact fixes each one wants — contrast, hierarchy, balance, alignment — and a Fix all. Every repair is gated: a fix that grades worse than what you had is discarded rather than applied, so the check can never talk you into a worse slide. Imported slides pass on sight; they are your design, not something to mark. Press H for the same instrument on the slide you are working on.

Color Studio

A whole colour system from one brand colour. Pick a brand seed and two accents follow a derivation rule — complementary, analogous, triadic, split or mono — then every seed becomes an eleven-step OKLCH ramp on one shared lightness spine, joined by a brand-tinted neutral and four status ramps. Open it from Studio → Color Studio.

• Semantic tokens — backgrounds, text, borders and focus carry light and dark values side by side; every text token is solved against its real background until it clears WCAG AA or AAA, and the measured ratio is printed beside it. Buttons even deepen themselves when a hue would otherwise strand their label.
• Scope & switches — flip Full to Lite for a starter set, and switch any section, ramp or token out of the exports.
• Formats — read every value as OKLCH, hex, RGB or HSL; hover any ramp cell to see it, click to copy.
• The system, worn — a live preview interface painted entirely from the tokens, light and dark side by side; every seed or switch re-dresses it instantly.
• Vision proofing — flip a lens to see the whole page as deuteranopia, protanopia, tritanopia or monochromacy sees it, with honest warnings when two meaning colours become near-twins.
• Charts — six categorical series colours spread from the brand hue, proofed against every vision and carried in the exports.
• Import from anywhere — eight curated starts, an eyedropper that picks the brand from any pixel on screen, or paste any CSS/JSON and the colours are found for you.
• Exports — CSS variables, a Tailwind v4 theme, design-tool variables JSON, the machine-readable palette (APCA included) — or a ready-to-paste agent brief with a share link that rebuilds the exact system anywhere. In the editor, one tap dresses the poster in the system.

Set the artboard from Design → Format. Sizes are grouped so you can find the right one fast.

Toggle portrait / landscape at any time. Crucially, changing format adapts the design — text rewraps, scale adjusts, and objects reposition to suit the new proportions — rather than stretching a fixed picture.

Typography is the heart of the studio. The Type tab holds the typeface library and a full set of refinements.

The typeface library

Over 140 self-hosted families across ten categories — neo-grotesque, grotesque, geometric, humanist, rounded, display, serif-display, serif-text, slab, and monospace. Browse by category or search, and lean on the curated pairings when you want a safe, expressive combination. Fonts are self-hosted, so they render and export identically offline.

Refinements

Craft is on by default. New posters ship with the full typographic craft pass — kerning, optical margin alignment, optical sizing, baseline lock, balanced line breaks, widow control, and hyphenation — already enabled. The Craft pass switch at the top of the Refine panel flips the whole profile at once; individual toggles fine-tune it. Documents you saved earlier keep exactly the settings they had.

Edit slot text in the Content tab — one field per slot. Beyond the layout, you can place free objects anywhere on the canvas.

The six object kinds

Editing on the canvas

• Select by clicking; multi-select with ⇧-click or a marquee.
• Move by dragging — smart guides snap to edges, centres, equal gaps, and the baseline.
• Resize with handles — they stay live even while an object is rotated, so you can size and turn in either order; rotate; nudge with the arrow keys (further with ⇧).
• Align & distribute, group, lock, flip horizontally / vertically, and change z-order.
• Set a custom colour on any text, independent of the palette roles.

Craft tools

The Inspector

The right-hand panel adapts to your selection. For a slot, it offers per-element type and colour overrides plus a contrast guard. For a free object, it offers kind-specific controls, layer tools (lock, hide, duplicate, delete), blend mode and opacity, rotation, masks, and constraint pins for auto-layout.

Add an image by uploading a file, pasting a URL, pasting from the clipboard (⌘V), or generating a procedural one — patterns, gradients, or flowing abstract noise-fields from Abstract Studio and the other Mini Apps. The Image panel and the Inspector give you a full darkroom.

Framing

• Fit — cover or contain; set a focus point so the right part stays in frame, and zoom to taste.
• Mask — clip to a rounded, circle, hexagon, or arch frame.

Treatment & grade

• Treatments — duotone, posterize, grain, invert, threshold, blur, motion blur, and a darkening overlay.
• Darkroom grade — exposure, contrast, saturation, temperature, tint, hue, highlights, shadows, vignette, and grain, all baked export-safe.

Colour from a photo

• Match accent — keep your palette but retune just the accent to the photo's dominant colour, tuned to stay legible. The surgical, one-colour way to make a design relate to its image.
• Pull colours — build a whole poster palette from the photo when you want the design to take its lead from the image.

When you want options, the studio generates them — always tasteful, never random for its own sake.

Shuffle & Surprise

Press S to shuffle the style or R to surprise with a fresh design. Set an explicit seed to reproduce a result, and use locks to hold what you like while the rest re-rolls. Both are quality-gated: each press grades several candidates and gives you the best one that reads cleanly — no more duds.

Explore board

Press V to open the board. Choose a creative direction — Surprise, Bold, Calm, Minimal, Editorial, Image, Mono, Warm, or Cool — and the studio generates a shortlist, grades each candidate on contrast, hierarchy, alignment, and balance, removes near-duplicates, and ranks the best. Click one to adopt it.

Morph

Place two finished designs at the ends of a slider and scrub a continuous path between them. Layout and palette blend smoothly (colour in a perceptual space), and discrete choices snap to the nearer parent — every point along the way is a valid, usable design.

Resonance

Resonance reads the mood of your copy across dimensions like warmth, energy, weight, era, and formality, then suggests a palette and type to match. Nudge the mood sliders, tap a one-tap vibe, or turn on “style as I write” to keep the design in step with the words.

Creative studios

The Create menu opens focused studios that generate art-directed work you can drop straight onto the canvas — each on the single-SVG path, so what you preview is what you export.

Board — a separate thinking canvas

Board is a self-contained infinite-canvas thinking space that opens full-screen from the Create menu or at its own #board address. It runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded — and autosaves as you go. It is quiet and gesture-first, and it tidies itself so a board never rots into a mess.

AI is optional and additive. Most of the studio works with no key at all; the AI tools use your own provider key, supplied once and stored only in your browser.

What needs a key

What each one does

• Compose with AI — describe a poster in words; get a full layout, type, palette, and objects.
• Design Copilot — a chat docked to the canvas that edits your poster step by step. It sees the poster as it works, streams its thinking, shows a live quality meter, and offers one-tap intents (Bolder, Elevate, On-brand, 3 directions…). Every edit is undoable — and it will never leave the poster below the quality floor.
• Design Crew — recruit a roster of specialist agents, each with a personality and a signature move. Apply a squad preset, ask it to build a crew for this poster, or author your own custom role.
• Multi-Agent Studio — your crew redesigns the poster together: each member takes a distinct direction and proposes with vision (never worse than the original), a judge panel scores the results, and the lead synthesises one champion that beats them all. Choose the depth — Fast, Balanced, or Deep.
• Art Direct — elevate the whole composition in one move.
• Campaign / Content / Localize / Deck — turn one brief into many assets, copy variants, translations, or a deck outline. Deck outlines open in Slide Studio.
• Brand Brain — store your brand voice and rules so the AI tools stay on-brand.
• Generate image · AI — turn a prompt into an image, placed straight into a slot.

The Motion tab brings a poster to life. Pick a preset, set the speed, and toggle looping — entrances like rise, fade, slide, and stagger, plus continuous moves like a slow pan, float, or pulse.

For full control, the keyframe editor choreographs each element individually — entrance timing, easing, and transforms. When you're happy, export to MP4, WebM, GIF, or an animated SVG that plays in any browser.

Press ⌘E to open Export. Because the preview is the source of truth, the file always matches the canvas.

Formats

Print controls

• Press marks & bleed — crop and registration marks with a bleed margin.
• CMYK soft-proof — preview how colours land in print gamut (a simulation, not an ICC conversion).
• Colour separations — output per-channel plates.
• Preflight — before a PDF export the studio runs an advisory pass: embedded fonts, text contrast, CMYK gamut, trim marks, minimum type size, a safe-margin check (flags text sitting within 3 mm of the trim, where it can be cut), and a colour-accessibility check (warns if the accent could be confused with the text or background for common colour-vision types).
• Presets — ready social sizes and print sizes (A-series, US sizes, posters) at the right DPI.

Beyond a single file

The Review tab helps you ship work that holds up.

• Critique — a live score out of 100 with a grade, across five dimensions: contrast (perceptual legibility), hierarchy (read intent-aware — a title is judged for dominance, a footer for restraint), alignment (measured against the grid, not just shared edges), balance, and rhythm (spacing regularity and healthy whitespace). One click fixes legibility issues.
• Linter — flags specific, located problems: overlaps, near-misses on alignment, too many type sizes or weights, accent overuse, off-grid objects, and awkward column widths. Each finding points to the element and offers a fix.
• Contrast — perceptual (APCA) legibility ratings so text clears a readable threshold on its background.
• Proof — CMYK and colour-blind soft-proof modes to check how the design reads in print and for different vision.
• Publish Gate — a final quality check with auto-fixes before you export.

Define a brand once, then produce unlimited work that is provably on-brand — a complete define → book → produce pipeline, all on the single-SVG path so every export matches its preview.

Build a brand — guided

Build a brand (under Produce) walks anyone through seven small steps — start from a name and one colour, a logo, or a curated start; then colours, typography, logo & imagery, words & voice, review, and produce — with a live poster preview and a readiness meter coaching the next best step at every stage. Each step is a curated slice of the same brand the Advanced studio edits, so you can switch between the two freely. You can keep several brands: switch, start new, duplicate, or delete from the Builder's brand chips or the Advanced studio's header switcher — every brand tool follows the active one.

Colours are fully yours: derive the palette from a seed (curated swatches, any picker colour, or a typed hex, with four harmony schemes) — or flip to Custom and set Paper, Ink, Primary, and Dark exactly as you like. Your picks are kept verbatim while everything derived around them stays readable, and a live contrast readout flags a hard-to-read ink with a one-tap Fix readability.

Brand System · Advanced

The Advanced studio is the full identity workspace — mood, identity, colour, UI, imagery, fonts, iconography, and AI guidelines — deriving a consistent light-and-dark token set, accessible by construction. Share a brand as a link, and Apply to editor pushes its palette, accent, type, and logo onto the current poster in one step.

Brand Book

Build a multi-page Brand Book set in the brand's own colours and type — cover, essence, logo, colour, typography, grid & spacing, iconography, imagery, voice, applications, and a closing page. Toggle sections in or out, choose a cover treatment (standard, minimal, or bold), preview every page live, then download the whole book as print-ready vector PDFs — or export a single page. Flip on Real designs and the "In use" page fills with actual produced work — three on-brand designs generated and placed for you.

Produce on-brand assets

One action turns a saved brand into a batch of unique, on-brand creatives. Pick the channels — posters, banners, social, screen, photo, or stationery (business cards in both orientations, letterhead, email header) — set a tone (bold, calm, editorial, and more) and a count, and the studio fans out distinct compositions, re-stamps each with the brand so it is on-brand by construction, and expands every design across the chosen sizes. Every card carries an On brand ✓ badge and a quality grade you can sort by; open any design straight in the editor, download one, regenerate just that one (same copy, fresh composition) from its hover action, or Export kit for the whole set as a zip. Turn on Elevate to art-direct each design a step further, and — with your own AI key — vary the copy across the batch (without a key, your brand copy carries every design).

Stay on brand

In the Review tab, Brand check grades the live poster against your saved brand — colours, type, accent, and logo — with a per-rule readout and an overall score. A single Make on-brand tap snaps any drift back into line. Your brand logo rides along: where a layout has a logo slot it fills it, and everywhere else it is placed as a clean corner sign-off — transparent, correctly sized, with an equal optical margin on any format.

Mini Apps

On Windows, use Ctrl in place of ⌘.

• Start from a layout, not a blank page. Type your copy first, then flip layouts with [ / ] to find the right structure.
• Keep hierarchy clear. One dominant element, then supporting levels. Two type sizes often beat five.
• Use one accent. A single highlight colour does more than several competing ones.
• Let alignment do the work. Shared edges read as intentional; the smart guides and the linter help you hit them.
• Lock what you love. Freeze the layout or palette, then shuffle the rest to explore without losing the part you've decided on.
• Check the Review tab before exporting. A quick pass on contrast and the linter catches the small things.
• Mind the medium. Soft-proof for print; pick Display-P3 for vivid screens; export transparent for stickers.

Do I need an account?

No. There's no sign-up. The studio runs in your browser and your work is saved locally.

Where is my work stored?

On your device, in the browser. Export to a file or share a link to keep a copy or move it elsewhere.

Does it work offline?

Yes for the core studio — layouts, type, editing, and export are all local. Only optional actions (AI features, stock images) use the network.

What about the AI features and my key?

They're optional and use your own key, stored only in your browser. Requests go directly to the provider; your key is never embedded in exports or shared links, and you own any provider cost.

Will my export match the preview exactly?

Yes — the preview and the export are the same SVG, so colours, type, and effects carry over precisely at any resolution.

Why can't I export video sometimes?

Video encoding depends on your browser's built-in encoder. When it isn't available, use GIF or animated SVG.

The whole studio is also available to AI assistants and scripts through a Model Context Protocol server. It runs locally on your machine and drives the very same engine — the same one inline SVG, deterministic by seed — so an assistant can design, refine, reformat, and produce real posters for you, returning PNG, SVG, print-ready PDF, and JPG inline. 29 tools, most needing no API key.

What an assistant can do

Connect it

1. With Node 20+ installed, add the server to any MCP client — a desktop assistant, an IDE, or an agent. Nothing to clone or build: npx fetches the published gridform-mcp package on first run and caches it.
2. For Claude Desktop, add this to claude_desktop_config.json (the key is optional):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gridform": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "gridform-mcp"],
      "env": { "ANTHROPIC_API_KEY": "sk-ant-..." }
    }
  }
}

The engine tools work immediately with no key. The AI tools use a key you supply — per call, or in the client's environment.

Browse & scaffold

Beyond tools, the server publishes resources — JSON catalogs of the layouts, looks, formats, palettes, fonts, and vibes, plus rendered specimen sheets you can preview — and ready-made prompts for briefing, critiquing, planning a campaign, and localizing.