HELP
Note: For best performance, we recommend using one of the following browsers: Firefox, Google Chrome, or Safari.
KEY POINTS TO REMEMBER
Saving Designs. Solid Line’s Custom Photo Case Builder was designed to be so simple to use that you can complete a design within minutes. It’s important to remember that a design is saved only when it’s placed in the shopping cart.
Performance. There are a few things that can affect the performance of the case builder: your computer, your Internet bandwidth, and our servers. We can control only the latter, and during certain times, heavy traffic may degrade performance. If you’re experiencing performance issues, we invite you to use our online contact form to let us know so that, if appropriate, i.e., the problem is on our end versus yours, we can add additional servers.
What you see is what you get. We mean it. The design you create as you see it is exactly what we’ll print. Preview is low-rez and is strictly for placement purposes.
GETTING STARTED
While we like to think our Custom Case Builder is so easy to use that no one will need help figuring it out, we don’t always get it right. The info is here, just in case – available if and when you need it. Click on a link below to jump to the topic.
Selecting a Layout
Drag and Drop
Image Sizing
Image Rotation
Sepia or Black & White Conversions
Adding Text
SELECTING A LAYOUT
The layout you choose dictates how many images you can use. Selecting the right one is important because changing designs midstream means having to start all over again as the system only temporarily saves the design until you put it into your shopping cart.
The layouts layouts shown at left are set to accept a preset number of images – one per box. Drag and drop a photo into each box. Resize if needed by grabbing the orange triangle located on the right bottom corner of the image and dragging it until the image is the size you want or until it fills the designated space. Once the image is the desired size, you can click and drag it into position, reorient it in 90° increments, and convert it to black & white or sepia. You can then add text.
CUSTOM CASE DIMENSIONS - IN CASE YOU WANT TO DESIGN OFFLINE
If you want to design a case that uses more than the number of pictures allowed by the layouts to the left, we recommend creating your design in another program - then uploading a JPG versionof the file into the single photo layout. Design with the following dimensions in mind:
iPad 1 - 1188 pixels wide by 720 pixels tall. The spine is centered and measures 72 pixels wide.
iPad 2 or 3 - 1135 pixels wide by 698 pixels tall. The spine is centered and measures 59 pixels wide.
Kindle Fire - 761 pixels wide by 554 pixels tall. The spine is centered and measures 41 pixels wide.
DRAG AND DROP
Drag and drop capabilities are layout constrained. The images you upload or the patterns you use from our clip art library can be dragged and dropped into a layout, but you cannot drag from one frame to another within the same layout.
Once inside a layout or a frame in a layout, images can be dragged into position, reoriented by 90° or 180°, and resized.
IMAGE SIZING
Vertical images are automatically resized when placed in a layout frame with the same orientation. You may adjust the size of the image by dragging the image until you see the orange triangle in the lower right corner of the image. Click and hold down the mouse and drag the triangle until the image reaches the desired size. Then click anywhere on the image and hold while dragging it into position.
Vertical images that are placed in a horizontal frame of a layout are never resized as that would require automatic cropping. Resize the image as indicated in the previous paragraph, and position it until you see the portion of the image you’d like on your case, keeping in mind that what you see is what you’ll get on your cover.
Horizontal images are also not resized. You will also have to resize these manually.
In most browsers, images automatically pop into the upper left hand corner of the frame or the layout. Click on the image and drag to the desired position. Click on the lower right corner of the image within the orange triangle to resize the image.
IMAGE ROTATION
Once inside a layout, images, text, and art can be rotated in 90° or 180° increments. Click on the image or the text that you want to rotate, then click on one of the rotation tools .
SEPIA OR BLACK & WHITE CONVERSIONS
To convert an image to sepia or black & white, click on the image, then the corresponding tool.
ADDING TEXT
Launch the text editor to add or edit text.
