Panels and geometry

This page explains a piece of behaviour you will rely on without seeing it.

The problem it solves

A cover wrap is laid out left to right: bleed, back panel, spine, front panel, bleed. So the front panel's position depends on the spine width — and the spine width depends on your page count and your paper.

If layer positions were stored as absolute measurements across the wrap, then every chapter you added would move the spine, and the entire front cover would slide sideways relative to its own panel. Silently. With nothing on screen to notice, until a print proof came back wrong.

What happens instead

Each layer is stored relative to the panel it sits on — back, spine, front, or the whole wrap.

So a title positioned two inches down and centred on the front panel stays two inches down and centred on the front panel, whatever the spine does.

Dragging across the spine

A layer's panel is re-inferred from where it ends up every time you move it.

Drag something from the back panel across the spine onto the front, and it re-homes to the front panel. From that point it moves with the front panel.

You do not have to do anything to make this happen, and there is no panel picker — the position is the answer.

Full-bleed artwork

A background image that covers the whole cover is anchored to the wrap, and re-stretches to each target's wrap rather than staying a fixed size.

That is what stops a widened spine leaving an unpainted strip down the middle of your artwork.

One design, several platforms

Because layers are panel-relative, one cover design can be checked against every wrap it has to print on.

On the release board, Show this wrap on the canvas re-points the studio at another publish target. The geometry changes — different spine caliper, different bleed, possibly a different page count — and your design re-projects onto it.

This is genuinely useful: KDP and IngramSpark editions of the same manuscript have different spines, and this is how you see both without maintaining two designs.

Changing paper mid-design

When the paper stock changes, the spine re-caliper happens under your design, and the studio re-projects the layers onto the new geometry.

Nothing jumps, undo still works, and layers stay on the panels they were on.

What to watch for

• This is also why the studio is single-selection. A group dragged across the spine would re-home only the layers whose centres crossed it, splitting the group across two panels.
• Older covers are upgraded on open. A design made before panel anchoring existed is converted against its current geometry, so nothing moves on screen.
• The barcode zone belongs to the back panel and moves with it, so it stays correct as the spine changes.