Studio is where you design the image and video templates that generate your ads. Build one template and Renable renders it automatically for every product in your catalog — swapping in each product's title, price, images, and reviews.
Studio is a direct-manipulation, WYSIWYG editor: you drag, resize, and style elements on a canvas, and what you see is genuinely what gets produced. The same rendering components that draw your canvas also render the final images and videos at scale, so there's no separate "export" step that might look different from the editor.
The layout#
- Canvas (center) — the design surface. Click to select an element, drag to move it, drag its handles to resize or rotate. Double-click a text element to edit its content inline. Hold space and drag (or use the middle mouse button) to pan, and Ctrl+scroll to zoom.
- Size toolbar (top-left, floating) — one pill per size your template supports. Click a pill to switch which size you're editing; the "+" button adds another size from a preset. See Sizes and formats.
- Canvas toolbar (also top-left) — the tool palette for adding elements (Select, Text, Shape, Frame, Image, Video, Audio), undo/redo, and zoom controls. See Elements.
- Panels — dockable panels around the canvas. By default the right side shows Preview on top, then Elements with Automations and Settings as tabs beside it, then Properties below, so the element tree and the selected element's properties are visible at the same time:
- Preview — pick a project, catalog, and product to see the template render with real, resolved data right on the canvas.
- Elements — the element tree for the current template.
- Properties — everything about the selected element: position and size, typography, fill, stroke, effects, and — for text/image/video/audio elements — the data binding. See Placeholders.
- Automations — the if/then/else rules that show, hide, or change content based on product data. See Automations.
- Settings — template name, description, associated catalogs, canvas size and background, and video settings.
- Timeline (bottom by default, video templates only) — appears once a template has a duration greater than 0. Shows each element as a track with its effects. See Video templates.
Arrange the panels your way#
Every panel can be moved: drag a panel's tab to stack it with another panel, to a gap between panels, to the space under the canvas, or to the edge of the editor to open another column — up to two columns on each side, with up to three panel slots per column. Drag the edges between panels and columns to resize them, and use the chevron in a panel's header to collapse it down to its tab bar (its neighbors take over the space; expanding restores the previous sizes). Press \ to hide all panels for a full-canvas view, and press it again to bring them back. Studio remembers your arrangement on this browser, so it's there the next time you open any template.
Draft, Publish, and Discard Draft#
Every change you make — dragging an element, editing a binding, adjusting a color — autosaves to a draft a couple of seconds after you stop typing or moving things. Nothing in that draft affects your live ads yet.
- Publish pushes the draft live. Channels using this template pick up the new design and regenerate their feeds shortly after.
- Discard Draft throws away your unpublished changes and reverts the template to the last published version.
This means you can experiment freely — reposition things, try a new layout, break something — without any risk to campaigns that are currently running. Nothing changes for shoppers until you click Publish.
A brand-new template shows blank ads until you publish it#
Because channels always render the published version, a template you've designed but never published has nothing published to render yet — so every ad in a channel using it comes out as a blank image. This is easy to hit right after creating a template: you build it, connect it to a channel, and the ads are empty.
Renable warns you in two places rather than blocking you. When you pick a template while creating a channel, an unpublished one is labelled not published yet and shows a warning — you can still go ahead. And once the channel renders, its Activity tab reports the template that hasn't been published, which clears automatically the next time the channel renders after you publish.
The fix is always the same: open the template in Studio and click Publish.
Channels and product selection use this same draft-then-publish pattern on their own data, under their own buttons — see Publishing a channel and Selecting and publishing products.
Where Aimée fits in#
Aimée, Renable's AI assistant, can edit a template for you conversationally from the same chat drawer you use everywhere else in the product — add or restyle elements, wire up bindings, adjust automations. Every AI edit is also autosaved to the draft, so it's covered by the same Publish/Discard safety net as your manual edits, plus its own version history you can restore from. See Working with Aimée and Meet Aimée for the full picture — this article won't repeat it.
If you used the old editor#
A few things moved or were renamed:
| You might remember it as... | It's now... |
|---|---|
| "Layers" | The Elements tab — a tree, not a flat list |
| The Placeholders panel (a separate list of all placeholders) | There's no separate panel — each element's binding lives in its own Properties → Binding section, and only appears for elements that can hold one |
| The Preview tool | A Preview panel, docked top-right by default and always available |
Everything else — publishing, automations, multiple sizes — works the way you'd expect, just with a more direct, per-element way of working.
Next steps#
- Creating a template to start your first design
- Elements to learn the building blocks
- Placeholders to connect product data