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Canvas

Canvas Panels

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The canvas keeps its chrome out of the way and brings it forward when you need it. Rather than a single fixed inspector, Builder Studio surfaces controls across a few overlay surfaces: a tool dock at the bottom, a quick-zoom dock and workspace menu at the top, contextual popovers tied to your selection, and a left sidebar that slides in for project and insert content.

Surfaces, not a fixed inspector
These panels float over the canvas and open on demand. Many are contextual — what they show depends on what you have selected — so the canvas stays mostly clear while you work.

The floating toolbar

The primary tool dock sits centered at the bottom of the canvas. It is where you create and reach the main canvas surfaces. Its buttons are:

  • Show left panel — toggles the left sidebar.
  • Add node — opens a menu of every node type, grouped by family (media and layout, AI generation, automation). See Nodes.
  • Create prompt node — opens a prompt entry surface and drops a new prompt node with the text you type.
  • Layers — opens the left sidebar on its Layers tab.
  • Properties — opens an editing popover for the selected node. It is enabled only when exactly one text or shape node is selected.
  • Shortcuts — a small dialog of quick-create actions for common AI nodes (AI text, AI image, speech).
Contextual image actions
When a single image node is selected, the toolbar grows an extra group of image actions — remove background, reset crop, crop, export, and expand. These appear inline next to the main tools. See the Image node reference for what each one does.

The properties popover

The Properties tool opens a popover anchored to the toolbar for editing the selected node's appearance. It is scoped to node types that expose editable visual properties — currently text and shape nodes — so the button is disabled, with an explanatory tooltip, when the current selection has nothing to edit.

Top-right controls

The top-right of the canvas holds two grouped surfaces:

  • The quick-zoom dock — zoom in, zoom out, fit to view, a zoom-percentage selector, and toggles for grid and snapping behavior. These are covered in Viewport.
  • The workspace and canvas menu — a settings button that opens a panel for renaming the canvas, viewing your credit balance, jumping to billing, changing the canvas background and dot colors, sharing, and toggling the sync indicator.

The left sidebar

The left sidebar slides in from the canvas's left edge. It has two modes:

  • Project mode — tabs for content already on the canvas: Pages, Layers, and Assets.
  • Insert mode — a library of things you can add, shown as categories. Picking a category opens a second preview pane beside the sidebar.

Opening the sidebar lands on project mode so the Layers list stays easy to find; switching to Insert is an explicit action. Closing the main sidebar also closes the preview pane.

Read-only behavior

Edit-only tools dim for viewers
Tools that change the canvas — adding nodes, creating prompts, the quick-create shortcuts, and editing properties — are disabled when you do not have edit access, with a read-only tooltip. Navigation, zoom, and the workspace menu remain available. See Roles & Permissions.

Related

  • Viewport — the zoom dock, grid, and snapping controls in detail.
  • Nodes — what the Add node menu and selection-driven tools act on.

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