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Introduction

🚨 You will need at least one kit setup to generate a campaign.

Your Design Kit is the bridge between your brand identity (colours, typography, logo rules) and the campaign assets you generate. It’s the “blueprint” that ensures your visuals are consistent, scalable, and still editable.

In Protaigé, a Design Kit isn’t just a static template folder — it’s a structured design system that lives in our engine. It defines:

• Editable zones (e.g. headline text, image placeholders, subhead, CTA)
• Design constraints (where elements must stay, aspect ratios, alignment margins)
• Dynamic content (text fields, image slots)
• Layout rules (responsive behaviour, stacking order)

Without a kit, every asset needs to be built from scratch — leading to inconsistency, manual errors, and wasted time. With a kit, the layout is fixed; only the content changes.

When you generate a campaign, Protaigé uses your Design Kit to automatically apply your brand look across multiple formats (social posts, banners, print, etc.) while preserving pixel perfection.

However, Design Kits need careful design setup. You can’t just dump in random PSDs and expect magic. The initial build of a kit is an advanced design task: mapping layers, defining constraints, and anticipating use-case flexibility.

That’s why we strongly recommend collaborating with your in-house designer or agency at this stage because this foundational step works best when done by someone who understands layer structure, responsive layout, and design trade-offs.

Essential reading

Design kits: Set up your PSDs

Design kits: Importing PSDs

Design kits: Importing Canva templates

Design kits: Fine-tuning your imported files

Design kits: Adapting a starter template

Design kits: Using the Brand Butler

How Design Kits Are Built in Our System

At the heart of Design Kits is a Parent–Child relationship. Any file in your kit can be defined as the parent asset — usually your key visual or hero design. From there, you can create as many child assets as you need.

• Changes made to the parent are automatically propagated to all children, so you don’t have to manually adjust dozens of variations every time you update a font, logo placement, or colour.
• Relationships between parent and child are defined by blocks. Naming text or image blocks consistently across layouts ensures the system recognises them as linked elements and keeps updates in sync.
• Child layouts inherit the parent’s rules but can have their own size, aspect ratio, and optional layer toggles.
• This approach keeps campaigns consistent while still flexible enough for multi-format execution.

Once you understand that everything flows from the parent, the rest of the kit setup will make sense. Here’s how the build process works in practice:

1. Import & interpret design source

Tutorials are available for all these pathways. Whichever route you choose, the system parses the structure (layers, groups, masks, metadata) and maps them into editable placeholders or locked elements.

2. Define placeholders & variables

• Dynamic, editable components are marked and labelled (e.g. h1, h2, cta, image)
• You specify which image layers are replaceable (with masks or shape constraints).
• For each variable, you can set default values, limits, or formatting rules (e.g. max length, font overrides).

3. Set constraints & locking rules

• Some elements can be fixed (e.g. logo position).
• Some properties (like font size, colour) may be restricted to brand settings.
• Others remain free within bounds (e.g. headline can shift, but not overflow).

4. Layout responsiveness & format versions

• Your kit can support multiple output formats (square, vertical, banner).
• There are no limits to the number of formats within a kit.
• The system adheres to your layout rules when format changes.
• Elements can be toggled per format (e.g. CTA buttons omitted in narrow sizes).

5. Save & version

• The result is a “kit” asset — essentially a set of templates with rules.
• You can update it over time: tweak constraints, swap default assets, add new format variants.
• All campaign generations reference the same kit, so your visuals stay homogeneous across time and team.

When (and why) to involve your design team

Because kits require design judgment, you’ll want your design team engaged for:

• Component structuring & naming — Clear, consistent naming lets the system map to variables without ambiguity.
• Deciding which elements are editable vs locked — You don’t want users (or non-designers) accidentally misalign the logo or move margins.
• Responsive layout decisions — Good designers understand how to let things stretch, crop, or reflow cleanly across sizes.
• Edge-case handling — Text overflows, image cropping, unusual aspect ratios – someone experienced has to anticipate and design fallbacks.
• Iteration & polish — Kits often evolve after real use; design partners can refine them based on feedback and constraints.

In short: the kit setup is a design project, not a trivial upload exercise. But once built properly, you can spin out consistent, high-quality assets at scale — with minimal manual oversight.

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