Four words do most of the work in Composerie, and they are easy to mix up: product, design, surface and template. This guide sets out what contains what. It is for anyone who has wondered why a second design will not attach to a product, or gone looking for surfaces on the product page and not found them.
The shape of it
Three of the four nest. A product holds a design, and a design holds surfaces. The template is the odd one out: it sits beside the design rather than inside it.
Product
A product is what a shopper buys. A poster, a mug, a folded card. Everything commercial hangs off it: the variants and their prices, the images that go to your storefront, the publication that puts it on a store, and the provider routing that decides who prints it.
The product page is where all of that lives. See manage your product list for the list, and variants and options for the purchasable combinations.
Design
A design is the artwork on that product, and the set of fields a shopper is allowed to change. You build it in the Design Studio.
In practice a product carries one design. Ask the dashboard for a second and it hands you the one that is already there rather than making another. That is worth knowing before you go looking for a way to keep two versions side by side: the way to do that is a template, or a second product.
A variant can be pointed at a design, and at a specific version of that design. That is the mechanism that lets an order stay bound to what the shopper actually saw, which design versions covers on its own.
Surface
A surface is a printable area inside one design. A poster has one. A folded card has a front and an inside. A shirt might have a front, a back and a sleeve.
Each surface is its own small canvas. It carries a name, its own dimensions and background, and its own layers. It can also carry the real-world print size in millimetres, and the exact output geometry the provider expects, including the bleed that gets trimmed away. That is why a design with two surfaces produces two print files rather than one.
Sides are edited in the Design Studio, not on the product page. Open Sides in the left rail, or Sizes for a product sold in several sizes. See manage a product’s sides and sizes.
Template
A template is a saved copy of a design, kept so you can start the next product from it instead of from a blank canvas.
The copy matters. A template does not stay tied to the design it came from: editing one leaves the other alone. That is the point of it, and it is also the thing that surprises people who expected a template to behave like a shared master.
Templates are offered when you create a product, under Use a template. See product templates.
A template does not show up on the product page. The Design card there shows only the product’s own design: its preview, its name, when it was last edited, and Open editor to work on it.
Where each one is changed
I want to change the price. Where do I go?
The product. Prices belong to variants, and variants belong to the product, not to the design.
I want to change what the shopper can type. Where do I go?
The design, in the Design Studio, on the Personalization tab of the layer you want to make editable.
I want to add the back of the shirt. Where do I go?
The design, in the Surfaces panel. A surface is part of the design, not of the product.
Can two products share one design?
No. A design belongs to one product. Save it as a template and start the second product from that template.
If I edit a template, does the product change?
No. A template is a copy. Editing it changes what your next product starts from, and nothing that already exists.
Next
With the vocabulary in place, read what a personalization field is, or go straight to your first personalizable product.