Direct Mail Postcards
Design Studio: Create Campaign Artwork in Vottiv
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 or letting AI design for you.
Design Studio is available to every Vottiv organization. Open Design Studio from the sidebar to get started.
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), ready to use in Vottiv Digital Ads or on ad platforms of your choice.
Yard signs — design at standard sign sizes, then request a print quote right from the editor.
Creating a Design
Open Design Studio from the sidebar and click New design.
Pick a canvas size and give your design a name.
Choose how to start: Design with AI (answer a few questions and get original designs created for your campaign) or Choose a template (browse the campaign templates for that size — rally invitations, GOTV reminders, endorsements, fundraising appeals, town halls, and more — or start from 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.
Design with AI
Choose Design with AI and Vottiv interviews you about the piece you're making — a handful of quick questions, one at a time. Some are multiple choice, some are a sentence or two, and it may ask you to choose or upload a photo. You can skip any question or go back and change an answer. It already knows your campaign's basics (candidate name, office, disclaimer), so it only asks about this specific piece — the event, the message, the tone.
Then Vottiv designs up to five original pieces for you at once, each in a different creative direction — bold, editorial, minimal, heritage, and vibrant — so your options look genuinely different from one another, with their own layouts, type, and color schemes. These aren't filled-in templates: every design is composed from scratch for your message. For postcards, every option includes both the front and a ready-to-mail back with the address area kept clear.
Designing this way takes a few minutes — typically two to five. You don't have to wait on the page: the work continues in the background, and every finished design is saved automatically to Your templates. If you stay, all the finished options appear together for you to compare. If you navigate elsewhere in Design Studio, a notification pops up the moment your designs are ready and takes you back to them.
Vottiv writes the copy from your campaign information and interview answers, and never invents dates, venues, endorsements, or records you didn't provide — when a specific fact is missing, it uses a general line that points voters back to the campaign instead. Still, review generated designs before sending or printing.
Pick your favorite — click Use this design and it opens in the editor as a completely normal, fully editable design.
Nothing is wasted — every option (picked or not) is already saved in Your templates, a personal template section that appears above the built-in templates whenever you create a design of that size. Rename or delete them anytime from the template picker.
Not quite right? Type what you'd like changed (for example, "more focused on the event date") and click None of these — regenerate for a fresh set. Each round's designs stay in Your templates.
Working in the Editor
Everything autosaves, including your library preview. The cloud icon in the header shows your save status. After your changes settle, Vottiv silently refreshes the finished artwork shown in the Design Library. When you leave with the editor's back button or your browser's Back button, Design Studio saves and prepares the latest design before navigating away. A full-screen saving message may appear briefly while that finishes.
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.
Change the canvas background by selecting the canvas and choosing a solid color or gradient in the toolbar. On templates with a full-canvas background image, choosing a color or gradient replaces that image; use Undo if you want to restore it.
Sidebar tabs give you size-specific templates (including Your templates saved from AI sessions), political text presets (VOTE, Election Day, endorsements, disclaimers, and more), your own uploaded images, stock photo search, shapes, and photo 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. A confirmation dialog shows a full preview of the new template 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. PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, and SVG are supported. Removing an upload hides it from the list without breaking any designs that already use it.
Stock photos — search millions of free professional photos in the sidebar: type a search and press Enter or click Search. Each photo shows its photographer credit, and you can drag any result straight onto your canvas.
Photo Frames: Drop Your Photo In
Photo slots in templates are frames — drag one of your photos (or a stock photo) onto a template's photo placeholder and it snaps in, automatically cropped to fit the frame's shape. Double-click any framed photo to reposition or re-crop it inside the frame.
You can also add empty frames from the Frames tab — square, landscape, portrait, rounded, and circle shapes, plus decorative frames — then drop a photo into them. It's the fastest way to get clean, well-cropped photos into a layout.
Arranging and Polishing
Layering — bring elements forward or send them backward, align them precisely, group them to move together, or lock them in place, all from the selection toolbar.
Transparency and filters — adjust any element's opacity, and apply one-click filter presets to photos.
Zoom — use the zoom control at the bottom of the canvas (10%–400%) to work on fine details.
Keyboard shortcuts — Copy/Paste (Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V), Duplicate (Ctrl+D), Select All (Ctrl+A), Delete, arrow keys to nudge, Ctrl+] / Ctrl+[ to move elements forward/backward, and Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- / Ctrl+0 to zoom in, out, and reset (Cmd on Mac).
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, Safety, and the Address Area
On mail canvases, Design Studio overlays dashed guide lines so your design survives printing and mailing:
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.
Address area (back only). A striped box in the bottom-right of the back page marks where the recipient's address and postage are printed. Keep artwork out of it — if your design overlaps the address area when you explicitly save or leave the editor, Design Studio warns you with "Artwork may block the address" so you can fix it (or save anyway if you know what you're doing).
Use the Guides button in the top-right of the editor to toggle the guide overlays 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; the back's bottom-right corner belongs to the post office.
Saving and Using Your Artwork
As you work, Vottiv automatically renders a print-exact image of each page and keeps the copy in your Design Library current. You can still click Save to Library in the top-right when you want to prepare it immediately and see a confirmation. From the Design Library:
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: pick your design in the Creative step of a Digital Ads campaign, or download the export to use on other platforms.
Send It Without Leaving the Editor
Next to Save to Library, the editor shows a send button matched to your canvas size — Send as Mail for postcards, Send as Text for MMS images, or Use in Digital Ads for ad sizes. Click it, pick the voter group you want to reach, and Vottiv carries your finished artwork straight into that channel's setup flow with the design already attached — no digging through the library.
If you keep editing, the Design Library preview updates automatically after autosave. You do not need to click Save to Library again before leaving the editor.
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 or an AI design — 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.
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