Sandbox is our new, interactive approach to onboarding

Readymag is a powerful tool but at times it may be tricky for beginners. To assist less experienced users in getting started, we’ve created Readymag Sandbox: a collection of playful tutorials designed to simplify and clarify the process and tools of our editor.

You can access these tutorials from the Learn page or from Learn section in your Profile: simply start a new project with a certain tutorial as a template, and you’re all set to practice. Currently, we have six tutorials: on buttons, text, images, shapes, grid and animation.

Below are the key points of each.

Widgets to study

The first tutorial we designed was one on buttons. Most of the functionality of Readymag's Button widget could be recreated with Shape widgets or even Text widgets, allowing a skilled designer almost infinite creative possibilities. The examples of buttons we encountered in our users’ best projects inspired us to build a button collection demonstrating just how easy it is to start creating at full power.

You can also copy your favorite buttons for your own projects.

The tutorial on text offers practical suggestions on how to alter fonts and text styles, configure text alignment, and split paragraphs into multiple columns.

The tutorial on images covers the basics of laying out visual graphics, from cropping to shaping to incorporating different types of backgrounds.

The tutorial on grid will teach you to balance layouts and arrange elements on a page with the use of the grid—a framework of dense horizontal and vertical lines that resembles graph paper, and guides—sparser sets of columns and horizontal lines.

The tutorial on shapes shows how to add geometrical shapes to your project, create borders of different colors and density and get access to the massive library of The Noun Project icons, available at the paid subscription.

The tutorial on animation will guide you through different types of Readymag animation, ways to combine them, and how to set up triggers.

Back and forth between browsing and editing

Even more important than simply teaching how to use a specific tool is helping users grasp the nuances of an effective Readymag workflow. That is, making incremental adjustments and constantly checking how each change affects the project as a whole.

This is why we structured the tutorials in the following way. We offer users practical knowledge (for instance, how to crop a picture) and then allow them to enter editing mode and experiment with the settings for each widget. Afterwards, users are prompted to repeat several actions in specifically designated areas.

However, users can go even further, altering all texts, styles, and widgets in Sandbox. That’s the spirit of the entire project: “You can change whatever you like.”

The unaltered version of each project is always available if you decide you want to start over. Just create another project with the same template.