Design Studio is Vottiv's built-in graphic designer. Instead of hiring a designer or wrestling with outside tools, you can create polished campaign artwork — direct mail postcards, text message images, and digital ads — right inside Vottiv, starting from professionally designed political templates.

Design Studio is currently available to select organizations. If you don't see Design Studio in your sidebar and would like access, contact support@vottiv.com.

What You Can Design

Direct mail postcards — 4x6, 6x9, and 6x11. Canvases are print-ready out of the box: bleed, sizing, and resolution are handled for you, and finished designs pass mail artwork validation automatically.
Text message images — Square and Tall formats sized for MMS.
Digital ads — standard ad shapes (social/link ad, medium rectangle, leaderboard, skyscraper, mobile banner) for use on ad platforms of your choice.

Creating a Design

Open Design Studio from the sidebar and click New design.
Pick a canvas size and give your design a name.
Choose a starting point: pick any of the campaign templates for that size — rally invitations, GOTV reminders, endorsements, fundraising appeals, town halls, and more — or select Start from scratch for a blank canvas.

Every template uses obvious placeholders (candidate name, office, dates, websites) so you can immediately see what to swap for your own campaign.

Working in the Editor

Everything autosaves. The cloud icon in the header shows your save status — there is no save button to remember.
Undo and redo with Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y (Cmd on Mac), or the arrows in the header.
Double-click any text to edit it in place. Use the toolbar to change fonts, sizes, colors, and effects.
Sidebar tabs give you size-specific templates, political text presets (VOTE, Election Day, endorsements, disclaimers, and more), a background image collection, your own uploaded images, stock photo search, shapes, and frames.
Switching templates replaces your design. Picking a template from the Template tab swaps out the entire design — both sides of a postcard — for the new template. You'll be asked to confirm first, because any work on the current design is discarded. To keep a version before trying a different template, duplicate the design from the library first.
Upload your own photos and logos in the Image tab under "Your Uploads" — drag and drop or click to browse.

Postcards Have a Front and a Back

Mail designs have exactly two pages, labeled Front and Back. Other formats are a single image. You can't add extra pages beyond that — a postcard only has two sides!

Print Guides: Trim and Safety Lines

On mail canvases, Design Studio overlays two dashed guide lines so your design survives printing:

Red line — trim edge. The printer cuts here. Anything outside the red line is bleed and will be trimmed off, so extend backgrounds all the way to the canvas edge but expect them to be cut at the red line.
Teal line — safety area. Keep all text, logos, and anything important inside this line so nothing lands uncomfortably close to the cut edge.

Use the Guides button in the top-right of the editor to toggle the lines on and off — your preference is remembered. Guides are visual aids only and never appear on your printed piece or exported image.

Rule of thumb: backgrounds run to the canvas edge; words stay inside the teal line.

Saving and Using Your Artwork

When your design is ready, click Save to Library in the top-right. Vottiv renders a print-exact image of each page and saves it to your Design Library. From there:

Direct mail: when setting up a mailing, open the Design Library and pick your design from the Design Studio tab — the front and back exports slot straight into the postcard front and back, with sizing already validated. See Introduction to Direct Mail Postcards for the full mailing workflow.
Texting: saved images appear in your uploads when composing MMS messages.
Digital ads: download the export and upload it to your ad platform.

If you keep editing after saving, click Save to Library again — mailings and messages use your most recent export, not the live design.

Managing Your Designs

The Design Studio library page shows all of your organization's designs with previews. From each design's menu you can rename, duplicate (great for making a variant of an existing piece), or delete it. You can also jump straight into a correctly-sized new design from the mail flow — the Design Library's Design Studio tab offers a one-click button for the postcard size you're working on.

Tips for Great Campaign Artwork

Start from a template — even if you change everything, the layout and type pairings give you a professional foundation.
Postcards are read at arm's length from a mailbox: one big message, high contrast, short words.
Don't forget your disclaimer — the Text tab includes a ready-made "Paid for by" preset you can drop in and edit.
Use high-resolution photos; images that look crisp at full zoom will print cleanly.