On our second stop

On this second stop of our tour of RZ Designer, we will see what goes on with that right sidebar and its buttons and panels.

Sidebar panels

 At the top of the right sidebar are four buttons. When each button is selected, the contents of sidebar panel changes. Let us delve into each button starting from the left...

• thing style - by thing we mean something you have selected on the canvas i.e. a text box, an image, a button, etc. By style we mean what it looks like i.e. size, color, border, etc. More about thing style will come.
• settings - here you will find one or more settings/options for your design ie. page size, web fonts, color palette, thumbnail image.
• thing tree - as you build your design, adding things to it, it gets difficult to navigate around. Thing tree is a hierarchical tree display of all you design's parts. You can expand/collapse the tree. If you click on something in the canvas, the tree will expand to that thing. Likewise, when you select a thing in the tree, it will be selected on the canvas.
• things - last but not least are the things themselves. Here you will find a large collection of all the things that can be used in your design. You typically drag n drop things onto the canvas then switch over to thing style where you may tweak it a bit.

All of the the right sidebar panels are pretty self-explanatory. Although, that style panel can be a little scary. If you are familiar with HTML and CSS or perhaps other tools like Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, etc. then that style stuff is no big deal. For everyone else, you may be scared. Well rest easy. We think you will rarely have to deal that scary style stuff, especially when working from a Gallery template. Granted, if you want to create a design from scratch, then you might have to delve into the style stuff.

Most of the time, you will pick a Gallery template to start with. Then perhaps select a few elements and teak them just a bit, maybe changing some verbiage or colors. That's not scary is it?

Let us say you are the firm's creative marketing genius. You are the master of the company's brand. Then you should be even more excited about the designer and what you can do with the designs you create. If that sounds like you then we say you've got to not only continue on with this series but also dive into the other related guides, especially those tagged with designer, designs, syndicates, or blasts.

At the next stop on our tour, we will visit the designer's canvas.