Designing with Canvas

A canvas is a design file you create and edit inside FireVue — a slide deck for your sponsor meeting, a flyer for the venue, a story for Instagram. Use the Create button in Drive and pick Canvas, then choose a format:

• Presentations — 16:9 or 4:3 slides, or a 16:10 MacBook Screen
• Print — A4 (portrait or landscape), A5 flyer, A3 poster
• Social media — square and portrait Instagram posts and stories
• FireVue Events — an Event Cover Banner at 1200 × 630 px
• Custom size — any width and height you need

Building your design

The panel on the left holds everything you can add:

• Text — a heading, subheading or body text. Double-click any text (or select it and press Enter) to edit it right on the page.
• Shapes — searchable basic shapes, lines and arrows, stars and bursts, symbols, speech bubbles and organic shapes.
• Images — suggested Pexels photos and image search. More results load as you scroll.
• QR code — generate a code from a link, with your own colours and padding.
• Uploads — your images, right in the panel. Click an image to add it, or drag it onto a page. More under Images below.
• Resize — choose a format or enter a custom size. Resizing changes every page for everyone, so you're asked to confirm first; existing content keeps its position and size, and you can undo it.

Select something and the toolbar above the page changes to match it: font, size, colour, bold/italic/underline, alignment and spacing for text; fill, border and corner rounding for shapes; colour and thickness for lines. Every slider has a number field next to it, so you can type an exact value (the arrow keys step it, Shift steps by ten). Every element also has opacity, Position (layer order and aligning to the page), lock, duplicate and delete. Select the page background to change its colour; the toolbar stays visible when nothing is selected.

Colour pickers show the colours already used in your design first, followed by event colours (inside an event), organization colours and a default palette. Below them you can type a hex code, click the rainbow swatch to pick any colour, or — in Chrome and Edge — use the pipette to pick a colour from anywhere on your screen.

Elements snap to the page edges and centre, and to each other, while you drag them — and the edge you're dragging snaps the same way while you resize. Resizing is live — text and shapes keep their proportions as you drag, and corner handles on text scale the font. For a line or arrow, drag either end handle wherever you want it (hold Shift for 15° steps). Hold Shift while clicking, or drag a selection rectangle across a page to select several elements, then group or delete them together.

Pages

A canvas can have as many pages as you like. Each page has its own controls to move it up or down, duplicate, delete or add a page after it, and Add page at the bottom appends one. Add a name beside the page number; image exports use that name, falling back to the page number.

Real-time collaboration

Open the same canvas with your team and everyone designs at once. You see other people's changes as they are saved — moves and resizes are shared when the gesture finishes — and a coloured outline with their name shows what each person has selected.

Changes merge per property: if one person moves a box while another recolours it, both changes stick. Undo only reverts your own changes, never a collaborator's.

Images

Images you upload in a canvas are saved to a Canvas folder in Drive, next to the Assets folder: in your event's folder, or at the top of Drive for canvases outside an event. The Canvas folder is private, so nothing you upload for a design becomes public.

The Uploads tab opens on that folder, but you can browse to any folder in Drive and use the images there. Upload images saves to the folder you're looking at (if you can add files to it), and images you drop or paste onto a page go to the Canvas folder.

A canvas shows each image only to people who can open it in Drive. Someone without access to an image's folder sees an image-off placeholder instead. Unavailable images are omitted from presentations and exports.

Select an image and choose Remove background to create a cutout using your organization's AI credits. The original stays intact, and saved masks are reused for the same Drive image without another charge. Choose Restore background to bring it back.

Present

Present shows your pages full screen, starting from the page you're on. Use the arrow keys, space or a click to move forward, and Escape to leave. A presentation shows the live canvas — if someone fixes a typo while you present, the change appears straight away.

Export

Export opens a small window. First choose the file type:

• JPG (the default) or PNG — one image per page; several pages download as a zip.
• PDF — one PDF page per canvas page.
• PowerPoint — text, shapes and images stay editable PowerPoint objects. Presentations are scaled to the standard PowerPoint slide size. Text effects, curved text and organic shapes are preserved as images.

Then adjust what that type offers:

• Size — a multiplier of the design size, with the resulting pixel size next to it. Print formats (A4, A5, A3) start at print resolution (300 dpi).
• Quality (JPG and PDF) — low, medium or high; lower quality makes smaller files.
• Transparent background (PNG) — leaves page backgrounds out, e.g. for a logo or sticker.
• Pages (designs with several pages) — all pages, the page you're on, or a custom selection.

Export downloads the file. The small cloud button next to it saves the export straight to Drive instead: choose a folder (it opens on your event's or organization's Assets) and click Save here. Handy for an image you want to use on your website — save it to Assets and pick it there.

Fonts are not embedded in PowerPoint files, so whoever opens the file needs the fonts installed to see them exactly as designed.

Import a PowerPoint or PDF

Import brings an existing PowerPoint (.pptx) or PDF into the canvas. It replaces the current design for everyone editing it — you'll be asked to confirm, and you can undo it.

From a PowerPoint, text boxes (with their formatting), images, shapes the canvas also has, lines and slide backgrounds are carried over. Charts, tables, SmartArt and animations are not, and gradients become solid colours.

A PDF comes in as one canvas page per PDF page, each holding the PDF page as an image you can design on top of. The text in it isn't editable. The page images are saved to the Canvas folder.

Open in Canvas. In Drive, an image, PDF or PowerPoint's ⋮ menu has Open in Canvas. It creates a new canvas named after the file in the same folder and imports the file into it (an image becomes a canvas sized to the image). The original file stays unchanged.

Keyboard shortcuts

Sharing and access

Canvases live in Drive, so they follow the same permission model as every other file: people need edit access on the containing folder to open a canvas and change it.

💡 Tip: Start event material from the right format — a 16:9 presentation for the sponsor pitch, an A5 flyer for print, a story for social — and keep them all next to each other in the event's Drive.