Design Studio Overview

Table of contents

The Design Studio (also referred to as the Studio) is Fugo's built-in design canvas for creating screen-ready digital signage content - things like digital menu boards, posters, promotional slides, dashboards displays, and interactive directories - without leaving the CMS or paying for a separate design tool.

Key things the Studio does for you:

What you can do in the Studio depends on your role's permissions:

If you don't have edit permissions, action buttons throughout the Studio (Create, Edit, Duplicate, Delete, template actions) will be disabled.

Log into your account or start a free trial here.

From the left-hand sidebar, go to Content → Studio.

This opens your Studio library - a grid of every content item your team has created:

The Studio library is your home base for managing your content.

Search by content name:

Sort by Name, Date created, or Last updated (ascending or descending):

Select multiple content items using the checkbox on each card to duplicate or delete them in bulk:

Click a content item to open a details panel on the right showing its preview, duration, how many media items it uses, and when it was created/last updated with quick actions to:

If you have no content items yet, you'll see two large starting options instead of a grid: start from scratch or use a template:

If you have no Studio content yet, you can create a new content item by choosing either:

From scratch - creates a blank, single-slide design and opens it directly in the editor.

From a template - opens the template browser. Picking a template creates a new design pre-filled with that template's content and opens it in the editor.

If you have content in your Studio library already, you can click Templates to open the template browser or Create to start a new design from scratch:

At the top of the editor, use the aspect ratio & resolution controls to set your canvas to:

Changing this at any point resizes the canvas immediately, and every element on it scales/repositions proportionally to fit the new dimensions - you don't need to manually re-place everything after switching orientation or size.

The editor is laid out in five regions:

The content's name (click to rename), undo/redo, zoom controls, the canvas size/orientation control, a save status indicator, and the Save button.

Where you add content to your canvas (see Adding content to your canvas).

It's a narrow rail of icons down the left edge: Search, Templates, Text, Shapes, Uploads, Media, Apps, Stickers, Frames, QR code, and Dashboards.

Click an icon to expand the menu with that category's options.

Your design surface. Scroll to pan around; zoom by pinching on your trackpad, holding Ctrl/Cmd while scrolling with a mouse wheel, or using the zoom controls in the top toolbar.

Appears floating above the canvas whenever you select one or more elements, with controls relevant to whatever's selected.

Toggles between Slides (thumbnails of every slide in this design) and Layers (a stacking-order list of every element on the current slide).

A carousel timeline also appears along the bottom of the canvas whenever you're editing a carousel element.

The left-hand content menu has tabs for every type of content you can add.

The Templates tab lets you browse and insert templates without leaving the editor - both your team's private Company templates and Fugo's shared template library.

Click on a template to add it to your canvas. From there, you can make changes to it such as adding your own logos, editing texts and fonts, changing colors, and adding, removing or replacing items.

Text offers a set of ready-made text presets (heading, subheading, body text, plus several styled combinations like bold display text, an elegant headline style, and a quote style).

Click one to drop it onto the canvas, then edit the wording and formatting directly using to contextual toolbar that appears when your text is selected:

Shapes currently offers Rectangle, Ellipse, Triangle, and Line - useful for creating backgrounds, badges, and dividers to help other elements stand out.

Click one to add it to your canvas. Then use the contextual toolbar to make edits such as changing its fill color, border color, and shadow.

Uploads lets you upload new images, videos, or audio files directly, and also browse everything already in your media library.

Click a thumbnail to add it to the canvas, or drag it into place. Use the contextual tool bar to edit its settings such as cropping, tint and touch settings.

You can also upload any media that's not already in your library by dragging it onto your canvas from a desktop folder or by clicking the Upload media button.

Media searches free stock content - photos, gifs and videos - so you don't have to source your own imagery for every design.

Click between the Photos, GIFs, and Videos tabs to find the right file type. And use the search bar to find a video or photo that you need (e.g. "barista").

Click one to add it to your canvas and use the contextual toolbar to edit its settings such as cropping, entrance animation, and touch settings.

Apps are a great way to connect your screen to some of your favorite business tools as well as create content that can refresh & update on its own.

Click or drag an app onto the canvas.

All apps will have settings that you'll need to configure. Click the cog icon in the contextual toolbar to configure the app.

This will open a modal where you can configure settings like authentication, content selection, or appearance of the app. For example, to configure the Power BI app, I'll need to log into my Microsoft account and select the dashboard or report I want to display:

After saving, your app will be added to the canvas where you can continue customizing the design:

Stickers shows a library of graphics you can drop onto the canvas. Click one to add it to your canvas.

Frames allow you to crop photos, videos, and apps to their shape.

Click your chosen frame to add it to your canvas. Resize & reposition as you want, then drag and drop media into your frame from the content menu.

QR code is a dedicated shortcut that drops a QR code widget onto your canvas. Click Add QR code to add one to your canvas.

Set the destination link by opening the QR code settings from the cog icon in the contextual toolbar:

You may be using Fugo's TV Dashboards feature to display secure dashboards & reports on your TV screens.

If you have saved dashboards in your Dashboards library, you can easily add them to your canvas to start customizing a slide show of your dashboards or a single dashboard display.

Click or drag a dashboard onto your canvas.

The Carousel button drops an empty carousel element onto the canvas.

A carousel (container) is a single element on your canvas that independently cycles through several pieces of content - think of it as its own mini-playlist running inside one part of your design, separate from everything else on the slide.

Carousels can hold: your own media, stock photos/videos, apps, dashboards, and shapes.

To build one:

1. Add a carousel to your canvas (or drag content directly onto an existing carousel element - hover for about a second to drop it in).

2. A timeline appears along the bottom of the canvas showing every item in the carousel in order. Click Add item and drag content items (such as photos or videos) from the left-hand content menu onto the timeline

3. From the timeline you can reorder items by dragging them, remove an item, and edit an item's duration by dragging its edge (in whole-second increments) - except videos, whose duration is fixed.

Zoom the timeline in or out to work with longer carousels more easily.

Select an element by clicking it. Select multiple by holding Shift while clicking.

Move a selected element by dragging it. While dragging, it snaps to canvas guide lines and to the edges of nearby elements to help you line things up.

Resize using the handles around a selected element. Hold Ctrl while resizing to lock its original aspect ratio.

Rotate using the rotation handle; rotation snaps to 15° increments (hold Alt or Shift for free rotation).

Round the corners of photo, video, app, dashboard, frame, and rectangle elements using the corner-rounding handle.

Right-click any element for a quick menu: bring to front/forward, send backward/back, lock/unlock, crop (where applicable), duplicate, and remove.

With an element selected, the floating contextual toolbar above the canvas lets you set its exact position, size, rotation, and opacity, move it forward/backward in the layer stack, lock it (to prevent accidental edits), duplicate, or delete it.

Selecting several elements at once shows a simpler toolbar limited to setting a shared duration, duplicating, or deleting the whole selection:

With a text element selected, the toolbar lets you set: alignment, bold/italic/underline, font family, font size, letter case (UPPERCASE / lowercase / Capitalize), line height, letter spacing, fill color, and a text effect.

Available text effects are:

each with its own adjustable intensity/offset/color controls.

With a shape (other than text) selected, the toolbar lets you set a fill color, a border (width and color), and a drop shadow (offset, blur, spread, and color)

Colors throughout Studio are fully adjustable, including transparency - useful for keeping designs precisely on-brand.

For photos, videos, and dashboards placed on the canvas:

Fit controls how the content fills its box:

Tint adds a dark overlay over a photo - handy for improving the readability of text placed on top of it.

Crop works for photos, stock images, dashboards, and apps.

We suggest zooming out a bit to give you more space to work with when cropping

Select the element and use the crop tool (from the toolbar, the right-click menu, or by double-clicking the element) to adjust exactly which part of the content shows and how it's framed, without needing to re-export or resize the original file.

The blue crop box can be used to crop out elements of your content & set the frame for the container.

The purple crop box can be used to stretch and shrink your content container and move it around to set its position within the frame.

Any element can be animated. With an element selected, open its Animate controls to choose:

If you want to preview all the animations of your slide from beginning to end, you can click onto another slide, then back on the slide you’ve animated. This is a quick way to review and fine-tune animation timing while editing.

For text elements only, a looping Ticker motion effect is also available, with its own speed control.

Drag the the text box to stretch the area over your canvas where the ticker will scroll.

Every element (except video, whose length is fixed to the video file itself) has an editable duration in seconds, found in its contextual toolbar:

This controls how long it displays before the slide or carousel moves on - and when an element's duration runs out, it automatically fades away rather than cutting off instantly.

A slide's overall duration is driven by the longest duration among its elements. You can view all the elements' durations by opening the Layers tab in the Slides panel:

If your elements have different durations, the Studio will warn you that some will disappear before others.

A single Studio design can contain multiple slides, similar to a slideshow. Use the Slides panel (right side of the editor) to:

On touch-enabled displays, you can make any element "touchable." Select the element and open its Touch settings to set which slide tapping it should jump to, with an optional setting to automatically return to the original slide after a delay.

This is useful for building simple interactive directories, wayfinding displays, or product/menu browsers.

The Studio doesn't use pre-defined "zones" - instead, you have complete freedom to place as many elements as you like anywhere on the canvas:

This means you can effectively split your screen into independent sections just by positioning elements (or carousels) side-by-side. Gor example, a video loop on one half of the screen and a rotating set of announcements on the other.

We'd still recommend keeping any one screen reasonably uncluttered so it's easy to read at a glance.

Studio has two template systems:

You can browse and apply templates two ways:

Applying a template always creates a new design copied from that template. The original template itself is never changed.

Studio saves are manual, not automatic. Use the Save button in the top bar; a status indicator next to it shows Saving changes…, Saved, or Unsaved changes so you always know whether your latest edits are safely stored.

Renaming your design is the one exception - it saves automatically as soon as you confirm the new name.

When you're done editing your content make sure you save then click Back to Fugo.

If you try to leave the editor with unsaved changes, you'll be asked to confirm whether to discard them or keep editing.

A Studio design isn't published directly from the editor or library. Instead:

This means the same Studio design can be reused across multiple playlists and screens, and updating the design (then saving) automatically updates everywhere it's used - you don't need to republish each screen individually.

Learn more about playlists 👉 Playlists: Overview

Still have questions about the Design Studio? Reach out via the support chat inside the Fugo CMS, or email us at support@fugo.ai - we're happy to help.