Add your own pages to a proposal

When to use this

Use this page when the document needs something the template does not generate for you: a welcome letter, a page of kind words from a past client, a photo spread, a care guide, or a thank-you to close. Your pages live alongside the generated ones and travel with any preset you save.

What you need first

• A proposal open in the design studio (from the event, choose Design).
• Photos you want to use already in your media library, or ready to upload from the Images panel.

Add a page

You can also start one from the Sections panel: Add page sits at the end of the outline and offers a blank page, a full-page image, or Import from Canva. Pages started there land at the end of the document, ready to move.

The new page keeps your template’s look. Change the template or colors later and your pages follow.

Put things on the page

Each page you add wears its name just above it. Click any empty spot on the page to select the whole page, and its toolbar appears above the preview: Background, Text, Image, Line, and Shape, along with a small menu for duplicating, moving, hiding from contents, showing or hiding the document header and footer independently, or deleting the page.

• Text offers Heading, Subheading, and Body text, each shown in your document’s own font. The new box lands in the middle of the page and drops you straight into typing, with its sample words selected so your first keystroke replaces them. A clear outline marks the box while you type. Drag that outline to move the box, even the moment you add it; a drag across the words selects them instead. Drag a corner to scale the lettering, a side to change how wide the lines run. Enter starts a new line. To finish, click anywhere outside the box, choose Done in the bar, or press Esc. Your text is kept every way. After Esc the box stays selected, and a second Esc selects the page. A click on another piece keeps your text and selects that piece in the same click.
• Image opens the Images panel so you can click a photo, or you can drag one from the panel onto the page. It lands at a comfortable size. Select it for Replace, Crop (drag to reframe, scroll to zoom), Alt text (a short description read aloud by screen readers on your client’s page), flipping, a see-through slider, and Corners for rounding. Press Enter with a photo selected to go straight to Crop.
• Line turns the cursor into a pen: press and drag to draw a line at any angle. Hold Shift while drawing to settle on tidy angles. Press Esc to put the pen away without drawing. Once drawn, drag either end to re-aim it, and use its toolbar for color, thickness, a solid, dashed, or dotted style, and arrowheads at either end.
• Shape offers a rectangle or an ellipse. Pick a fill from your theme’s colors so shapes restyle with the design.

Add is always in reach too. While the page or anything on it is selected, an Add button shows just above the page, next to the page’s ··· menu. It offers Heading, Subheading, and Body text, then Image, Line, Rectangle, and Ellipse. New pieces land on top of everything else on the page. This is the way to add to a page that a photo covers edge to edge: click the photo, choose Add above the page, and pick what you need.

To change text later, click the box once to select it, then click again where you want to type: the cursor lands right where you clicked. A double-click does the same in one go, and a triple-click selects a whole paragraph. Edit text in the box’s toolbar is another way in, and so is Enter once the box is selected: the cursor lands at the end.

Drag anything to move it. Guides appear as you go so pieces line up with the page and with each other. The round handle under a selection rotates it, settling gently on tidy angles. Backward and Forward in the toolbar control what sits in front of what.

Dragging a photo’s corner keeps its proportions, so faces never stretch; hold Shift if you want to stretch it on purpose. Rectangles and ellipses resize freely, and Shift keeps them in proportion instead.

Right-click works everywhere, too: right-click a piece for copy and paste, layer order, lock, and delete; right-click the page for duplicate, move, page color, and delete; right-click beside the document to add a page. Right-click a photo and choose Set image as background to turn it into the page’s edge-to-edge background. If you prefer the keyboard, press T, R, or C to drop a text box, rectangle, or circle onto the page in view, or L to draw a line there. With a piece or one of your pages selected, the new piece lands on that page, on top, so T adds text over a full-page photo.

Color the page

Select the page and choose Background to open the page color panel. Pick from your theme’s colors so the page restyles with the design, tap your brand color, or type any color of your own. Colors you have already used gather in the panel under Used on your pages so you can reach them again, and they print exactly as you see them, on your client’s page and in the PDF. On a full-page image, the same control colors the border that shows when the photo does not fill the page.

Duplicate a page

Choose Duplicate page in the page’s menu, or press Cmd/Ctrl+D while the page is selected. The copy lands right after the original, everything on it included, and keeps the same name.

Round the corners of a photo

Select any photo and choose Corners in its toolbar. One stepper rounds all four corners together. Tap the link button to shape each corner on its own, which is how you build an arch: set both top corners high and leave the bottom corners at zero. You can type an exact value or use the plus and minus buttons. The rounding shows in your editor, on your client’s page, and in the PDF, and it stays put when you flip or rotate the photo.

Work with several things at once

Drag across the canvas to draw a selection box. You can start it in the gray space beside a page, between two pages, or on an empty part of a page, so a page that is full of pieces is no problem. Everything the box touches joins the selection, even a piece it only partly covers. The box selects on one page: the first of your pages it reaches. Drag near the edge of the canvas and the canvas scrolls with you. Hold Shift while you drag to add to what is already selected, or hold Shift and click to add and remove pieces one by one. Press Cmd+A (Ctrl+A on Windows) to select every piece on the page you are working on, except locked ones. A thin outline marks the whole group.

A selected group moves together and stops as one when any piece reaches the page edge, so your arrangement keeps its spacing. The toolbar for a group offers align and distribute, plus duplicate and delete, and one undo brings the whole group back. A click with a small wobble selects a piece without moving it.

A few shortcuts save trips to the toolbar: duplicate with Cmd/Ctrl+D, copy and paste with Cmd/Ctrl+C and Cmd/Ctrl+V (paste while looking at another of your pages and the copy lands there, in the same spot), or hold Alt and drag to pull a copy off the original.

Lock what is finished

The padlock in the toolbar locks a piece in place. A locked piece cannot be moved, resized, or deleted, and it never joins a group: a selection box leaves it alone, and if you lock a piece that is part of a group, it drops out of the group. This keeps a finished background safe while you arrange things on top. When a locked photo or shape fills the whole page, there is no empty spot left to click, so click the locked piece to select it and use Add just above the page: new pieces land on top, and the background stays locked. You can start a selection box on a locked background too. Click a locked piece and choose Unlock when you want to edit it again. Locking changes nothing on the printed page.

Formatting text

While typing, the bar above the page covers the essentials: paragraph and heading styles, the font (your template’s faces, or your own uploaded fonts for this one text box), size, color (with your brand color one tap away), bold, italics, underline, alignment, and lists. The spacing button holds two dials: line spacing for the room between lines, and character spacing to spread a heading’s letters apart or tuck them closer — the letter-spread scales with the text size, so it holds its look if you resize the box later.

The braces button inserts a detail that fills itself in per event, such as the client’s name, the venue, or the event date. Each option shows the value it will use right now, so “Dear Sofia,” is never a surprise. A detail that is not set on the event prints blank, and the Checks panel points it out before you send. Once a detail sits in your text, click it to see where its value comes from and what it will print, with a shortcut to set it if it is still blank. The text box sizes itself around the real filled-in value, not the small tag you see while editing: a long venue name wraps and the box grows to hold it, and a short value lets the box tighten back up. A change of font works the same way: a box that holds one line grows to keep that line whole when you try a wider pairing or face, and a box you have widened by hand never gets narrower than you left it. A box holding a paragraph keeps the width you gave it and re-wraps.

What happens next

• Pages save as you work, and undo covers your page edits (element moves, text, styling). Rename a page on its label just above the page, or in its outline row; the name saves when you press Enter or click away.
• The Sections panel shows your pages in the document outline, right where they fall between the sections, each with a small preview of the page itself. Click a page’s name to jump the preview to it, or open the row’s settings to rename the page — the new name saves when you press Enter or click away. The same settings offer Hide from contents: the page stays exactly where it is in the document, but its line on the Contents page goes away and the remaining entries close ranks — handy for a second cover or a decorative divider that does not belong in the list. The row wears a small marker while a page is hidden, and clicking the button again brings the line back. Show header and Show footer sit beside the name and contents controls, and both choices also live in the page’s ··· menu above the canvas. Use either part on its own or turn on both to match the rest of the document; the footer includes the page number. The canvas shows the real header and footer as you design, so you can see exactly where to keep your own text and photos clear. Pages you made before these options were added stay without a header and footer until you turn them on. Each choice saves with the page and travels with presets. Drag the grip at the left of the row to move the page anywhere in the document. Dragging a page that was set to follow one particular arrangement loosens it to follow the whole section instead; to pin it to an arrangement again, use Move up and Move down on the page’s own menu in the preview — those steps land in the fine gaps between arrangement pages. If you would rather not drag, put the keyboard focus on the grip, press Space, step with the up and down arrows, then press Space again to drop it. Move up and Move down also live on the page’s menu, the ··· beside its name above the page.
• A page placed between arrangement pages stays with its arrangement. Add, remove, or reorder arrangements and the page moves with the one it follows. If that arrangement is ever removed, the page slides to the end of its section, and nothing is lost. Drag it back into place if you want it somewhere else.
• Saved presets carry these pages too. Because arrangements differ from event to event, an in-between page arrives at the end of its section when you apply the preset — drag it into the gap you want.
• Your pages print in the PDF and show on the client’s page exactly as the editor shows them.
• If a photo on one of your pages is deleted from your media library, the page shows an empty spot where it was. The Checks panel names the page, and send waits until you pick a new photo for that spot or remove it. A draft PDF still downloads in the meantime.
• If anything ends up hanging past the page edge — easiest to do with a rotated shape — the editor marks it with a red dashed outline and an Off page chip so you can pull it back before it clips in print.
• Changing the document’s page size (A4 or US Letter, under Page layout) re-fits your pages to the new size: shapes keep their proportions, edge-to-edge art stays edge-to-edge, and text keeps its line breaks. A notice asks you to review the re-fitted pages.
• Save the design as a preset and your pages come along. Applying a preset to a document that already has its own pages asks whether to keep them.

Related pages

• Design your proposal documents
• Build a proposal in the workspace
• Organize photos in the media library