PLIC Books comes with some pre-built candid layouts that your customers can use when designing their Books. You are able to add your own from the Studio Layout tab.
It will start with an empty category called Studio Layouts. As you add more types of layouts, you will need to click on the green Category button to create new categories such as Child Ads, Sports Pages, etc... You can set a category to only be visible to specific Book Formats or specific Project Types by clicking on the blue pencil icon button. They will default to be shown to all of your customers.
To get started, click on the green Candid Layout button. You will need to give the layout a name, and optionally pick the size of the layout if you have multiple Book Formats. When customers apply the layout to a page, it will auto scale to fit the actual size of the book they are working on, but it is still best to design the layout to be as close to the original size of the book as possible.
Once you press Ok, you will be redirected to the new candid layout designer. From here you can design how the page should look.
Most of what you will need for designing a layout will be on the Design Elements tab that is selected by default. You can add them to the page by dragging them over to the layout space. You can also double click anywhere on the page to create a text box.
The most important two elements are the gray picture box and the New text element boxes. The gray picture box is to create an image placeholder. When you drag one onto the page, you will be creating a spot where an image should go. These are perfect for designing a re-usable layout. You as the designer decide where the images should go, and the school will later drag which images they want into those places.
The New text element box can also be dragged onto the page to create a new text box. While you can put any text or styles you want, they should be kept generic so that the school can customize them to say what they want later.
For some layouts such as Year In Review you might want to not be putting placeholder content. If you need to add images, click on the Images tab pictured below. You can then press the plus icon to add new images to this album. After you are done uploading images, they will show up as options for you to drag onto the page.
There is also an option to add a background to the layout. Most layouts should be designed without a background so that the customer can use their own theme or backgrounds.
From the School Layouts tab, you can also design layouts for specific schools. The design process will be the same for school layouts. The layouts under School Layouts will be linked to the selected organization from the top project dropdown. You can also save a layout you designed as a studio layout to a specific school from the actions dropdown for each layout and then selecting Save as School Layout.
