What is Elements?
Elements is a feature of all Designer products, offering a huge selection of templates, photo filters, widgets, stock photos & illustrations, SmartShapes and more, with very flexible browsing and searching options within a resizeable window.
There is also a Designs Gallery within the program, which mirrors the structure of Elements and offers quick and easy access to content that you are using regularly.
Accessing Elements
Elements can be accessed from the program File menu, File > New from Elements or from the program Insert menu, Insert > from Elements.
Keyword Searching
All content in Elements is searchable, making it easy to find templates and components to add to your document or website. Select a category folder on the left and then enter a keyword in the search field to search in that category only. Or select ‘All’ on the left to search all available content.
Designs Gallery
In v23 and later, the Designs Gallery structure mirrors that of Elements (except for the stock photo and illustration library, see below) and is also updated online with new content as it is released. You can drag and drop content from the Designs Gallery onto your document, so this offers a very quick and easy way to access your commonly used content.
Note only Elements has a search function and the bigger window makes it a good option for finding new assets.
The Designs Gallery (Designer Pro+ v23)
Stock Photos
This is unlike most stock photo libraries you may be used to, where you purchase a ‘royalty free’ image, with restricted license terms, often with limited production runs, limited reproduction rights, no re-distribution rights
An increasing number of photographers are submitting their work to the public domain, in particular under a license called CC0, which is a very liberal license, totally royalty free, where you can use the image for personal or commercial use with almost no limitation. Read more about the CC0 license.
In conjunction with Pixabay, a website that collected and collated a huge number of high quality CC0 images, we have included a section in Elements where you can search and download hi-res photos directly into Designer.
Stock Illustrations
In addition to stock photos, there’s now an additional category of vector graphic ‘stock illustrations’. All the images have keywords so you can easily search for the graphic you want. Select the Stock Illustrations category on the left side and enter a search term, such as ocean - see below.
Because the original vector files vary enormously in size, graphics larger than around 300px are scaled down. Also un-grouped images, are placed in a group for ease of manipulation. Because this is vector clipart, it’s re-sizable to any size without loss of quality.
Keep Elements open after selection
Normally when you click on the Import button over the item you’ve chosen in Elements, the item is imported and the Catalog window closes. However, if you hold the Shift key down when clicking Import, the item is imported and the Catalog is kept open. This is useful if you want to try out several different items without having to keep re-opening the Catalog.
Download high resolution photos (recent change)
In older versions of Designer, the photo resolution was limited to HD (1920x1080), but in recent versions when you import a stock photo into a print document you get the photo’s full resolution. The resolution of photos varies, but most are much higher than HD resolution. Note when you import into a web document, as when importing local photos, the resolution is still limited to HD because it’s rare to need any higher resolution than this for a website.