Text placeholders

Text placeholders are the slots customers type into. A name on a jersey, a date on a card, one bold word on a mug — whatever your product needs.

Adding a placeholder#

From the template builder, click Add text and drop the placeholder onto the canvas. Drag the corners to set the bounding box. The bounding box defines where the customer's text can sit — tight if the artwork demands precision, generous if you want to give them room to play.

Placeholder text and character limit#

Two settings that move customer behaviour more than anything else on the page:

• Placeholder text — the hint shown before they type. "Your name" beats "Enter text" by a mile. If the hint signals the kind of input you want ("Max 12 characters"), customers self-correct before they even start.
• Character limit — hard cap. The field stops at the limit. Set it on products where overflow breaks the print: thin name patches, narrow sleeves, small cards.

Letting customers move and resize#

A Lock position toggle in the placeholder settings decides whether your customer can drag and resize.

• Locked → the text sits exactly where you placed it, sized exactly as you set it. Right for templates that need precision (signage, athletics jerseys).
• Unlocked → the customer can drag, scale, and rotate within the bounding box. Right for templates where personalisation should feel hands-on (cards, gifts).

Fonts#

Two ways to make fonts available:

• Google Fonts — paste the Google Fonts URL into the font settings.
• Custom font upload — upload .woff2, .otf, or .ttf. The font loads in the customizer and in the final print files.

Set as few or as many fonts as you want. Customers only see the ones you've enabled.

Colour palette#

Same pattern. You define the colours the customer can pick from — each one a hex code and a display name. "Black", "Charcoal", "Brick red" — name them how your shoppers think about them.

Set one colour and the picker collapses to a label. Useful when your brand palette is non-negotiable.

Stroke and shadow#

For impact text — varsity numbers, signage, anything that needs to read against a noisy background:

• Stroke — coloured border around the letterforms. Set the colour and width. Renders in the preview and the print file.
• Shadow — drop shadow with colour, blur, and offset. Off by default. On for letters that need to lift.

They compose. Stroke + shadow is the classic jersey treatment.

Alignment#

• Horizontal — left, centre, right within the bounding box.
• Vertical — top, middle, bottom within the bounding box.

Default is centre/middle. Change it when the bounding box has a specific job: baseline text on a curve, top-aligned text in a small label area.

What customers see#

The toolbar shows the controls you've enabled — font picker if you've allowed more than one font, colour picker if you've allowed more than one colour, alignment toggles. Stroke and shadow render but aren't customer-controllable. That's a styling decision you've already made for them.