Lockdown & Customer Modes
Control exactly how much creative freedom each product gets — designer, form, or inline mode, plus font, colour, tool and dimension locks. Try the mode switcher.
The difference between "customers love designing" and "support inbox full of broken artwork" is control. Every template carries its own constraint set and one of three customer modes.
Flip between the three modes#
One template, three customer modes
The live canvas replaces the product gallery image itself — designing feels native to your theme, no popup.
Custom Candle Jar
R 289
Name on label
✓ Design attached · Edit design
The mode is set per template, so different products can behave completely differently — a mug in full designer mode, a stamp as a quick form.
The modes in detail#
Designer#
The complete studio: sidebar tabs, layers, uploads, effects. Best for creative products — posters, apparel, art prints — where the design is the product. You can still restrict tools, fonts and colours underneath.
Form#
Customers never touch the canvas. Each editable object you defined becomes a plain form field — single-line text, multi-line text, an image upload, a visibility checkbox — and the design updates live as they type. Zero learning curve; ideal for stamps, name labels, and engraving where layout must not move.
Inline#
The live canvas replaces the product gallery image itself, with the form fields rendered in your theme's layout. Designing feels native to your storefront — no popup, no context switch. Smart gallery detection finds your theme's image slot automatically (with a CSS selector override for unusual themes).
The lockdown toolkit#
Per template, you can:
| Control | Effect |
|---|---|
| Allowed tools | Hide any of the seven studio tabs (e.g. remove Uploads and Photos entirely) |
| Allowed fonts | Limit the font picker to an approved list |
| Allowed colours | Limit every colour picker to your brand palette |
| Lock dimensions | Customers can't resize the canvas |
| Lock shape | Customers can't change the canvas shape |
| Lock background | Background colour is fixed |
| Lock border | Stroke/border settings are fixed |
| Auto image filters | Apply grayscale / invert / threshold to every upload automatically |
| Print guides | Show or hide the bleed/trim/safe-zone overlays |
| Personalisation required | Disable Add-to-Cart until the customer has saved a design |
And at the object level, only elements you marked editable can be touched at all — everything else is part of the artwork.
The starter stamp templates show the pattern at its best: locked dimensions and shape, a six-font allowlist, black-ink-only colours, auto-threshold on uploads, and inline mode. Customers change the words; the product stays production-safe.
Customer options#
Templates can also carry customer options — extra choices rendered in the form, like an ink-colour swatch row or an add-on dropdown. Their values ride along to the order as line item properties, so fulfilment sees exactly what was chosen.
Related guides#
- Templates & the Starter Library — creating and binding templates
- The Storefront Block — how modes appear on your product page
Was this helpful? If something isn't working, contact support.