Pieces and their settings

A nametag in the builder is made of three kinds of piece: text, images and groups. There are no free-standing shapes. The coloured plate behind a tag is a group’s background.

Adding pieces

The Insert section of the left panel adds a new piece to the canvas:

Tile	What you get
Name	Your name, large and semibold.
Title, Company, Department	That detail line, smaller and slightly faded.
Text	A custom line that says “Your text” until you change it.
Logo	A square slot that shows the logo from your Details.

New pieces are placed where they don’t overlap anything already on the canvas.

Settings for any single piece

When exactly one piece is selected, the inspector starts with:

• Align: line the piece up with the left, centre or right, or the top, middle or bottom. The label beside it tells you what it lines up against: to frame for a piece on its own, to group for a piece inside a group, or to each other when several are selected. With three or more pieces selected you also get Distribute horizontally and Distribute vertically.
• Position:
  • X and Y are the position in pixels.
  • W and H are the size. Text height follows the font size, and a group’s size follows its contents, so those boxes are greyed out when they don’t apply.
  • Rotation goes from −180° to 180°.
  • Opacity goes from 0 to 100%.

The buttons at the top of the inspector work on the selection:

• Group (⌘G) and Ungroup (⇧⌘G).
• Bring to front and Send to back.
• Lock, which stops the piece from moving on the canvas.
• Duplicate (⌘D) and Delete (⌫).

Text

Content → Shows decides what the line says:

• Name, Title, Company or Department follow that field in your Details.
• Custom text is fixed wording you type into the Text box, such as a tagline or a pronoun line.

Typography:

Setting	Options
Font	Sans, Serif, Mono, Display, Rounded
Weight	Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, Extrabold
Size	8 to 200
Tracking	−5 to 30 (letter spacing)
Align	Left, centre or right, inside the text box
Style	Italic, Uppercase, Drop shadow
Colour	A colour and its opacity

Fonts are chosen from the ones already on your computer for each family, so Serif may look slightly different on another machine.

Images

An image piece is either the Logo slot, which shows the logo from your Details, or a picture used only in this design.

• Source:
  • On a logo slot, Use own picture swaps in a different picture for this piece only.
  • On a one-off picture, Replace picks a new picture and Back to logo returns the piece to your logo.
• Fit:
  • Fill covers the box and crops what doesn’t fit.
  • Fit shows the whole picture inside the box.
• Radius rounds the corners, up to a full circle.

An empty logo slot is drawn as a dashed square, so you can place it before you have a logo.

Groups

A group holds other pieces and can draw a plate behind them. Its box always wraps its contents plus padding, so you size a group by moving and resizing what’s inside it. You can still rotate a group, and everything in it turns together.

Background → Type:

• None: no plate.
• Solid: one Colour.
• Gradient: From and To colours at an Angle from 0 to 360°.

When there is a plate you can also set:

Setting	What it does
Radius	Rounds the plate’s corners.
Padding	Space between the plate’s edge and its contents, horizontally (X) and vertically (Y).
Leading bar	A coloured bar down the left edge, with its own width and colour.
Border	An outline, with its own width and colour.
Shadow	A soft shadow below the plate.

Several pieces at once

With more than one piece selected, the inspector shows how many and offers Group when they can be grouped. Drag any of them to move them all. Align and Distribute line them up against each other.