Design templates
Create ready-made designs once, attach them to products or offer them in a gallery, and let customers start from something instead of a blank canvas.
A design template is a finished design your team creates once. Attach it to a product and the designer opens pre-loaded with it; publish it to your gallery and shoppers can apply it while they personalize.
Templates raise conversion because a blank canvas is intimidating, and they protect your production quality because you decide what shoppers may change.
How design templates work
- Start from a product or a blank canvas. Design on a product’s real print areas so everything sits exactly where it will print, or pick a physical size and start from a blank canvas.
- Add placeholders and rules. Drop in text and image placeholders, decide what shoppers can edit, and lock everything else in place.
- Publish and attach. Set the template to Active. Attach product templates to their products so the designer opens pre-loaded; blank-canvas templates can also appear in the store gallery of the Templates panel.
Creating a template
Go to Design templates → New design template and choose how to start.
From a product
Your design is laid out on that product’s real print area, so sizes and positions match the printed result. The product also becomes the template’s measurement reference when the template is later applied to other products.
Choosing a product here does not attach anything
This step only picks a drawing surface. After saving, you attach the finished template to any of your products from the template page or a product page.
Only products that already have a designer setup can be used. If the list is empty, configure a product’s print area first.
From a blank canvas
Pick a physical size and design freely. Popular presets are offered — A4, A5, US Letter, US Legal, 22×24 full size, DTF adult / youth / toddler / baby, square, postcard, business card — or enter your own size.
The size defines the template’s print dimensions. Buyers can apply the design to any product, and it is scaled to fit their print area. Blank-canvas templates are the ones that can appear in your store’s template gallery.
Details and rules
On the template page you set:
| Field | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Name | What merchants and shoppers see. |
| Description | Optional context for your team. |
| Category | Two-level categories for browsing. |
| Tags | Free-form labels for search and filtering. |
| Lock objects when opened from a product | See below. |
Locking
With lock objects on, shoppers can edit the content of template objects — change the text, swap the photo — but cannot move, resize or delete them. Turn it off to let them rearrange the design freely.
Lock it for layouts that must stay exact (a badge, a label, a compliance mark). Unlock it for looser designs where the customer is expected to rearrange things.
Attaching a template to a product
From the template page, or from the product page’s Design template card:
- Press Attach design template and pick an active template.
- The designer for that product now opens pre-filled with it.
Notes:
- Drafts already in progress are never changed. Attaching only affects newly opened designers.
- If the template was authored on a differently named side, Customezo tells you how it maps, for example This template was authored on the “Front” side. On this product it opens on “Main”.
- If a template is deactivated or archived, attached products fall back to a blank canvas until you reactivate or replace it.
- Remove detaches the template; the designer opens blank again. Existing drafts and orders are not affected.
The store gallery
Turn on Templates panel for customers in Designer settings to show a Design templates panel inside the storefront designer. Shoppers browse your gallery and apply a ready-made design while personalizing.
You can also include the Customezo template library — platform-provided templates — alongside your own. Library templates are read-only: you cannot edit them, but you can attach them to products.
Lifecycle
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Draft | Being worked on; cannot be attached. |
| Active | Attachable and visible in pickers and the gallery. |
| Archived | Kept in your library but no longer attachable or pickable. Products using it open blank. |
Delete permanently removes the template and its design; archiving is the safer option when you might want it back. Templates in use tell you how many products would be affected before you archive or delete them.
Categories and tags
Manage both from the taxonomy section of the Design templates page:
- Categories group templates for browsing; two levels are supported (for example Apparel → Team wear). Deleting a category makes its templates uncategorized, it does not delete them.
- Tags are free-form labels used for search and filtering. Deleting a tag removes it from every template.
Availability
Design templates can be unavailable for a store when:
- your plan does not include them — upgrade to create and attach templates, or
- the module is disabled platform-wide — your settings are kept and apply again once it is back.
You can always turn templates off for your store in Designer settings; you cannot turn on something disabled by the platform or your plan.