Sticker Snippets are a great way to create easily configurable documents for Buyers. Sticker Snippets are small design blocks that are easily placed and personalized by a Buyer. You can create Sticker Library Templates to organize and store your Stickers to be used across all of your Templates and products once they are saved and published within a Sticker group. Additionally, you can create Stickers in a Standalone Template by simply marking the document as a Sticker Snippet document in the Document Context menu.
Most other editors have little Text or Image insert icons which the customer can select to insert basic texts and image frames onto their product, but they often can not do much more than this. Printess has developed Sticker Snippets, which are a special feature that let Buyers quickly add simple text and images to their product but can also be used for much more complex tasks.
To allow a Buyer to insert a simple image or text frame that they can use to write a custom message or upload a personal image to, simply add the “printess-basic-text” or “printess-basic-image” Sticker Snippet groups to the pages you want this feature to be available on.
As a starting point, the “printess-basic-text” group is used to add custom Single and Multi Line texts, and the icons appear as below on the Buyer Side:
For images, we also have the “printess-basic-image” group which Buyers can use to directly insert square and round image frames, the icons to add a round or square image frame appear as below on the Buyer Side:
Tip: You can also change these icons (and most others) on the Buyer Side UI by using Custom Translations
Sticker Snippets automatically stick together and all of their editable texts and images are grouped into a one simple to use UI for editing.
An exception are Stickers which contain only one Frame. This single Frame will not be grouped and therefore allows for Stickers which can later on be used like a single Frame. This is perfect for building a Sticker Snippet library in the Designer Side!
Notice: We recommend to avoid Flex settings like Anchors and %, %%, <% units in Sticker Snippets as it will lead to unexpected behavior of the Sticker Snippet when inserted into a target document.
To dive right into creating Stickers and see how we recommend to organize your Sticker Snippet libraries, feel free to also check out, modify, and use our existing Sticker Snippet libraries from the bottom of the New section of the Printess Template Browser:
There are two ways to easily create Sticker Libraries.
This will open the Template Type menu, here you can simply select Sticker Library and click Save:
Now that we have our Sticker Library, let’s go through the complete process step by step:
In this example, we are going to create a Sticker Snippet to be added and configured by a Buyer later on. Sticker Snippets are always one page documents. So lets create one page which fits all the contents filling the page.
We want the text to be editable later so we will enable content editing for both text frames in the Buyer Side settings.
Stickers can have the same settings like frames in documents. So you might allow for color changes, font changes or more.
Info: Sticker Snippets will always be grouped and can be moved or deleted.
Go to the Document Frame Features tab (deselect all frames and navigate to the ruler icon on the Frame Features panel).
At the bottom of the tab define the Tag(s) for the Sticker Snippet that will show up on the Buyer Side. You can select from existing Sticker Snippet tags or create a new one. (Learn more about snippet tags here!). Tags are selectable later on to define which Stickers are shown on Buyer Side, so they are like a category.
Optional Thumbnail
By default, the thumbnail for a Sticker Snippet is created from the Sticker automatically. The Sticker Snippet will be rendered from all frames which will be visible on Buyer Side (print-only layers will be invisible)
If one wants to define a custom thumbnail for a Sticker Snippet it can be uploaded here.
Choose Publish Snippets from the Template Context menu to publish all Sticker Snippets in the Template.
After this, the new Sticker Snippet(s) are available for use and can be easily found in the Sticker Snippets resource tab:
With the Column icons below the Tab drop-down, you can set the amount of Sticker columns (1-4) per sticker cluster for the Buyer Side Creative Photo Product tab.
For example, selecting 4 columns for the emoji Sticker group and 2 columns for the basic text Sticker group (as shown above) would appear like this on the Buyer Side:
The Link button 
below each Sticker Snippet in the search can be used to directly open and edit a Sticker Snippet.
Please see here for details on how to enable published Sticker Snippets to be added to the Buyer Side or how to use them on the Designer Side.
Assigning Stickers to Buyer Side
The available Sticker Snippets for a Buyer are defined at the page level. This makes it possible for a Buyer to select individual Sticker Tags for different pages.
With a greeting card scenario, one might enable a Sticker selection for only the inside card pages that does not allow the Buyer to alter the front or back of the card. This can be achieved by only assigning Sticker Snippets to the inside pages while omitting Sticker Snippets on the front and back pages.
Sticker Snippets are assigned by adding the Tags from which Stickers are selected to the Buyer Side settings in the Stickers tab.
Please see here for details on how to assign Buyer Snippets to pages.
Using Sticker Snippets
Here we added the “love” and “printess-headline” Sticker Snippet groups tags for use on our Greeting Cards example Template. As you can see, all the Buyer needs to do is select the Sticker Snippet to insert it onto the page where it can then be further customized.
Users can add one or more Sticker Snippets onto a page and resize them or delete them again. All frames inside Sticker Snippets are automatically grouped and cannot be ungrouped by the Buyer.
All frames of the Sticker Snippet will be inserted on the Base Layer. It does not matter on what layer they were during the time of publishing.
If a Sticker Snippet uses a Sub Document it will be inserted into the current Template.
Creating and Exporting Sticker Snippets in Manual Merge and Standalone Templates
Creating Sticker Snippets in a Manual Merge or Standalone Template is also easy because every created document is already a Snippet! The only thing left to do is to mark the document as a Snippet document in the Document Context menu, tag it, give it a name and publish it. After that, it will be available to add as a possible choice for Buyers or used on the Designer Side.
Sticker Snippets can contain Sub Documents that will automatically be imported when a Sticker is used.
Although, if you want to use Sub Documents you have to be aware of certain limitations.
Form Fields and Styles in Sub Documents
Sub Documents imported together with a Sticker Snippet will only carry over document resources such as form fields and Styles. Avoid using Template Styles for form fields. Instead, make sure they are created at the (Sub)-Document level and NOT on the Template level.
Read more about Styles and Form Fields in the Resources chapter.
Image Filter Sticker Snippets are a special kind of Sticker Snippet which allows to create stunning image effects and even add elements around the image. These effects can then be selected by Buyers for their uploaded images when creating documents.
Image Filters are basically built like a Sticker Snippet - as a single page document. However, there are a few special things about Image Filter Sticker Snippets:
Start by creating a new one page document in your Sticker Library Template. You will notice the new document is already labeled as a Sticker/Filter Snippet.
Now place your example image on the page and make sure the frame dimensions exactly matches the page dimensions and the frame is placed at the top left of the page.
This image will be replaced later on by the customer image.
To tell Printess which image to replace for this filter select the image, navigate to the Buyer Side settings and enable Content:
Next we just want to switch on Is Image Filter Target.
Notice: Only one image in the filter document may have this property switched on.
Then add image effects (it is also possible to add effects to the target image), masks, overlays, and additional elements to finalize your image filter.
In this simple example the image is masked a shadow is added and a paper structure is multiplied on top to create a simple but stunning image filter.
Tip: The Layer panel indicates if an image-filter-group is active. The designer can permanently persist the filter by simply ungrouping and re-grouping the frames.
As Image Filter Sticker Snippets will be resized to match the target image dimensions there are special considerations to take:
Used shadows and overlay images should be set to stretch with the target image to always stay unclipped - stretching will barely be noticeable unless the filter is used in extreme aspect ratios. To achieve stretching select the image, go to the Images tab and with the fill mode selected, deselect Keep Aspect Ratio.
When placing additional elements, like the flower petals in the below example, one need to consider as well that the document size and aspect ratio will change. Elements must be placed using anchors and sized using percentage values (%, %%, <%, >%) like in any flex layout. But the effort is worth it, the following example is also ‘just’ a filter.
Learn more about flex designs here.
Tip: Using the minimum percent unit <% for width and height of an element let it be of the same size when having horizontal and vertical aspect ratios. One can also use normal % values and the fit property of an image to achieve the same behavior.
You need to tell Printess that this is not just a Sticker Snippet but an Image Filter. Navigate to the general document properties (deselect all frames and click on the Ruler icon to the right). At the bottom of the tab you will find the Sticker export properties.
Activate Export as Image Filter and provide a Title and add/select one or more Tags.
Finally, we can publish the Image Filter in the Template drop down like every other Sticker Snippet.
Using an Image Filters Sticker Snippet is different than Sticker Snippets. First you want to navigate to the Buyer Side settings (with no frame selected). At the bottom of the tab you can select one or more tags containing Image Filter Sticker Snippets which should be available whenever a Buyer uploads images.
Now when a Buyer uploads images they now will be presented with an Image Filters tab in the Upload Image section where all the selected filters are presented. As you can see, the thumbnail for the filter is simply the thumbnail of the Image Filter Sticker Snippet document - very handy!
Also, note that the Buyer can still use the standard filters to change contrast brightness as long as they are switched on, even if a filter is active.
