Studio holds the job around the design: brief, directions, review, delivery

Most design tools start at an empty canvas. Client work does not. It starts with a message, moves through a conversation about direction, goes round several rounds of changes and ends with a set of files that have to be right. Studio is the part of Voidcanvas built for that job around the design. The Editor still makes the pixels; Studio keeps track of everything else.

Why a job needs its own home#

When I built Art Director Studio for designers in Nigeria, the brief was usually a chat message and the review happened in the same thread. Details went missing: the date left off the poster, the sponsor logos forgotten, a file called final_final2.png. None of these are design problems. They are record-keeping problems, and software is good at records.

So a Studio job runs in six tabs, in the order the work happens: Brief, References, Directions, Key visual, Review and Deliver. A tick shows which steps have something in them, and nothing is locked. See Studio overview.

The brief, read for you#

Press Start a job and paste the brief exactly as it arrived: an email, a WhatsApp message, a list. Studio reads it on your device and picks out the headline, subheading, date, time, venue, price, call to action, contact and up to five must-haves, such as sponsor logos or a hashtag. Prices are recognised in ₦, N, NGN, £, $, €, GHS and KES, because those are the currencies the briefs arrive in.

Things said to you rather than things to print are left out on purpose: deadlines, budgets, 'please send drafts'. If the reader guesses wrong, add a labelled line such as Headline: Lekki Nights and it takes that instead. It also suggests the formats the brief mentions, so a line asking for 'an IG post, a story and an A3 poster' becomes the job's list of deliverables.

That reading travels. When you start the key visual, the Editor's Brief panel shows it as a checklist that ticks itself off as matching text appears on the design. Start a job from the client's brief has the full rules.

References that explain themselves#

Drop in the images the client sent and the ones you have in mind. For each one, Studio reads its palette by how much of the image each colour covers, its light (key, contrast, temperature, direction), its composition and its lettering, and lists close Google fonts for the type style. Take the look saves the reference's colour grade so you can apply it to your own photos as an adjustment layer. See References and palettes.

Two or three directions, not one design#

Clients choose better between clear options than they react to a single design. The Directions tab is an open board with frames for Direction A, B and C. Sort references, notes, swatches and type cards into them, give each a name and an idea in one line, and present them full screen, as a PDF at 1920 × 1080, or as WhatsApp images: 1080 × 1350 JPGs that fill a phone screen in a chat. When the client picks, press Client chose this one and that direction's palette and type seed the key visual.

One key visual, every format#

You design one hero in the Editor. Studio then builds every other format from it, placing each element by its role (headline, image, logo, call to action) rather than shrinking the whole picture. The formats stay linked, so a late change to the date goes into all of them with Update formats from the master, and layouts you adjusted by hand are kept.

A record of every round#

Each time you show the client something, save a version. New version from the design renders every format and numbers it v1, v2, v3. Pin their comments to the image, paste their reply and press Turn into a checklist to split it into to-dos. Compare puts any two versions side by side or under a slider, and Mockups places the design in a real photo, from a street wall poster to a phone in hand. The review pack PDF and WhatsApp images carry a footer naming the job and version, so a forwarded screenshot still says which round it came from. See Directions and review.

Delivery without the last-minute mistakes#

The Deliver tab renders every format at full size in the file types you tick and names each file client_job_format_version, such as lekki-nights_launch_a3-poster_v2.pdf. Print formats get a PDF at trim size with 3 mm bleed and crop marks. The zip includes a delivery note listing every file, size and font, and a brand sheet when the job has a brand. Deliver every format explains each part.

Status that keeps itself#

A job moves from Direction to Design to Review to Delivered as you work, without you setting it. The Next bar at the bottom names the single most useful thing to do, such as Paste the brief or 2 formats to build, and the same label shows on the Studio home screen, so your job list doubles as a to-do list.

Start a job in Studio