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Getting Started: Your First Design

Five minutes from open to a real, editable design. This tour follows the exact path your hands will take — no concepts you don’t need yet.

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1. Pick a surface

At the bottom of the window is the AI toolbar with three tabs: Ideate, Design, and Slides. They’re three different kinds of agents:
  • Design — generate a fully editable design (a landing page, a poster, a dashboard) straight onto the canvas.
  • Slides — describe a deck and get it laid out frame by frame.
  • Ideate — turn an idea into a mind map or a written artifact (strategy, guide, brief).
Start with Design — it’s the fastest way to see what Portals can do.

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2. Say what you want

Click the input field and type something concrete. Not a vibe — a brief:
“A landing page for a small surf school in Biarritz. Hero with the name, a class schedule, and a CTA to book.”
Then send it. The canvas comes alive: a frame lands at the exact size for your design, and the model starts building — you’ll see the elements stream in and group themselves on the layers panel as it works. That streaming isn’t decoration; it’s the build happening in real time, and you can interrupt or redirect it.

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3. Meet your design

When it lands, everything is editable — this is the whole point:
  • Click any element to select it. Drag to move it, drag a corner to resize it.
  • Click the text and retype it — the box grows with your words.
  • Find the element on the left layers panel, right-click it, and duplicate, group, or reorder it.
  • Change colors, type, and effects in the right properties panel.
Change something big — a headline, a color — and watch the layout reflow instead of breaking. That’s containers doing their job.

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4. Make it yours

A few gestures worth knowing before you go:
  • Space + drag anywhere on the canvas pans the view — and it works in the timeline too.
  • Cmd/Ctrl + scroll zooms; the multi-select box that appears stays glued to your shapes while you zoom.
  • Right-click a layer to duplicate / rename / group / ungroup / reorder / delete — and note the delete item is red, because it’s the only one that means it.

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5. Ship it

Export when you’re ready — the design travels as real structured content, not a flattened image.

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Common issues

  • The model picked the wrong kind of output. If you said “brand guidelines” and got a design instead of an artifact, the intent detector missed a keyword. Say the artifact type out loud — “artifact”, “document”, “guide” — or switch to Ideate and ask for a written artifact explicitly.
  • A generation failed mid-thought. The thinking toggle (the brain icon beside the model selector) trades speed for depth. Long thinking runs occasionally truncate; flip thinking off for quick, reliable vector and SVG work, keep it on for the big design asks.
  • Nothing happens when you type. Check that a model is actually selected in the model selector — a dead or missing model is the usual suspect, and the picker will show what’s available.

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Next

The one concept that changes how you design: Containers & auto-layout. And when you’re curious about any tool, the design tools and AI surfaces pages cover every one.