Design

Design is a drawing canvas the shape of your block. Not a page, not a photo, not a canvas you resize later. Whatever you typed into the block dimensions when you made the project is what you are drawing on, at that ratio, forever.

The block fills the window. The chrome floats over it: a dark toolbar across the top, a narrow rail down one edge, and a zoom readout in the corner that says Fit, 1:1, Fill or a percentage. It never lies about scale, so 1:1 really is the block at true millimetres.

The toolbar

Button	What it opens
Tool	Pencil, Fine pen, Broad marker, Texture roller, Eraser, Lasso
Color	Ink swatches, a custom ink picker, your recent inks, the current hex
Layers	The layer list, or a pin button that floats it as a panel
View	Companion window, preview modes, guides, zoom
Actions	Registration marks, reference import, exports, print, handoff

The primary button on the right says Send to Separate, or Open Separate once a separation exists. The session pill sits beside it.

The edge rail

The rail carries what your hand reaches for without looking: stroke width, ink opacity, the eyedropper, undo and redo. The width slider reads out in millimetres on the block, not pixels.

The rail sits on the left by default. If you draw left-handed, turn on Settings ▸ Drawing hand ▸ Left-handed and it moves to the right, along with the companion window.

Tap and hold on the canvas to sample a colour. If the Pencil is already down, use the rail's eyedropper button instead: it arms the next tap.

Undo and redo

Two-finger tap undoes. Three-finger tap redoes. The rail has buttons for both, and a hardware keyboard does ⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z. Every gesture in Brayer has a visible button somewhere.

Layers

A design holds up to ten layers. That is a limit, not an oversight. A relief print is a small number of passes, and ten is more passes than most presses will ever see.

Each row has a thumbnail, the name, a visibility eye and a lock. Open the details and you get:

Control	What it does
Layer opacity	0 to 100%
Blend mode	Normal, Multiply, Screen, Overlay
Move layer up / down	Reorders the stack
Rename layer	Give it the ink name, not "Layer 3"
Delete layer	A design keeps at least one layer

Pin the Layers popover and it becomes a floating panel you can drag anywhere and leave open. While you are mid-stroke it shrinks to its thumbnail strip so it stays out of the way.

Seeing the block, not the drawing

The View menu is where Design stops being a drawing app.

Companion. A second window beside the canvas, showing one of three things:

• Mirror companion. What the block must look like. A relief block is the reverse of the print, and this is the single fastest way to catch a letterform or a hand that will come out backwards.
• Reference. An imported photo beside the block.
• Block state. Mirrored and thresholded, which is the carve.

Preview. Three read-only views of the current drawing:

• Threshold. Pure black and white, what will carve. Black is what stays on the block; the rest is carved away. A slider at the bottom sets the level.
• Posterize. The tonal steps a reduction could print. A bottom bar adds and removes levels.
• Contour. Edges as the lines you would cut.

Guides. Symmetry (Horizontal, Vertical, Radial 2, 4, 6, 8 or 12, with new strokes mirrored across the guide), Grain (None, Lino, Wood, Paper tooth, an overlay so you can judge the design against the block's surface), and Block boundary, which draws the edge, a 5 mm safe area and corner marks.

Keep inside the safe area. The 5 mm at the edge of a block is where clamps, tape and inky thumbs live.

Registration marks

Actions ▸ Add registration marks adds Corner crosses, T-bar or kento as a layer of their own. They are a layer, so you can hide them, move them under everything, or delete them without touching the drawing. They travel into the exports.

Reference and trace

Import a reference from Actions ▸ Import from Photos or Import from Files. Files accepts PNG, JPEG, HEIC or the first page of a PDF.

Turn on Trace mode and the reference locks behind the canvas at the opacity you set, so you can draw over it. Turn it off and the reference goes back to the companion window.

Exports

Export	What you get
PNG — native	The flattened design at its working resolution
PNG — mirrored for the block	The same, reversed, ready to transfer
PDF — 1:1 block size	A page at exactly your block dimensions
Print 1:1	AirPrint, at exactly your block dimensions

Print at 100%. Turn scale-to-fit off. A 1:1 sheet that came out of the printer at 96% is worse than no sheet at all, because you will not notice until the second colour will not line up. The Carve plan module has a printer calibration ruler for exactly this. See Carve plan.

Handing off

Actions ▸ Send to Separate flattens the visible layers and opens the Separate module with that image as the source. Do it again later and you get a fresh separation from the current state of the drawing, without disturbing the first.

Actions ▸ Send to Carve plan makes a carving guide from the design and opens Carve plan on it.

Hiding everything

Four-finger tap on the canvas hides the toolbar and the rail. So does View ▸ Hide interface, and ⌘. on a hardware keyboard. A small grabber at the top brings the chrome back, and so does another four-finger tap.

Keyboard shortcuts

Keys	Action
⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z	Undo, redo
⌘0	Fit to window
⌘1	Actual size, 1:1
⌘M	Toggle the companion window
⌘T	Threshold view
⌘.	Hide or show the interface
[ and ]	Thinner, thicker

Not in this version

There is no PSD import or export. A reference photo comes in as a flat raster layer, not as its own layer stack.