Gravit Designer 3.1 just landed
Clouds, templates, and diamonds — this version of Gravit is huge.
You know, we’re working hard here at Gravit HQ to bring you the best possible design software, always and forever free of charge. With this release, we finally merged the old Gravit.io into the new Designer — now you have everything available under the brand new Gravit Cloud. But there’s more to come: we offer a broad selection of design templates, make it even easier to get started with video tutorials and let you easily transition from Sketch with full-fledged file import. Please keep reading for all improvements you get with Gravit Designer 3.1. You can use it online, download it from our website, or update directly in the respective app stores (it may take up to 48h until the update is available there). It’s free! 🙂
Gravit.io = Gravit Designer
Everything started with Gravit.io. But with our re-branding and the new Designer app, introduced with version 3, we fully focused on this release. This, however, made us neglect the old platform a bit, leaving people wondering where to go. With the current release, we finally merged the old Gravit.io platform into Gravit Designer.
But fear not: none of your files are lost, and you can keep designing as usual in the new version — all possible with the new Gravit Cloud. Even your existing user account still works, including your previously created designs. Getting started is easy-peasy with our newly designed splash screen, where you have all the new options available. Read on to learn what we’ve up our sleeves for you.
Gravit Cloud
The introduction of our desktop app for all major platforms a while ago with Gravit 3 was a huge step towards making Gravit Designer available for everybody, no matter of system or location. However, a major issue was that you couldn’t start a design in the browser and continue in the desktop app of your choice. That’s history: with the all new Gravit Cloud you can upload your designs, open them on all platforms (Mac to Windows, you know), and manage them, right from the brand new start screen (“Open Gravit Cloud Files”).
After you have entered your existing credentials from gravit.io you can see all designs you have created so far here. This is also the place to organize them into folders, change the sorting in the top-right corner or delete a design.
If you are new to Gravit Designer or the Cloud, creating a new account is just as easy and only takes a couple of seconds. After that, all the functionality can be found in “File” in the menu bar. To bring the splash screen back, select “New design…”, saving a file to the Cloud is available from “Save to Cloud…” On the other hand, “Save” alone lets you decide whether you want to create a file offline on your hard-drive or in the Cloud (desktop version only). Changing this behavior, later on, is easy, though: just flip the “Cloud Syncronization” switch in the inspector. That’s not the only place to detect the saving location of a design: a purple icon next to the file name in the top-right also shows its status. Next to it, you can log on or off from the Gravit Cloud.
Sketch Import
People love designing with Gravit. But what’s the best design app worth if you need to recreate all your assets you formerly designed in another application? For some this was a deal-breaker, so time to reshuffle the pack. With Gravit 3.1 you can import your Sketch designs from v43 up in the full extent and keep working as nothing happened. Did we mention there is a small catch? Until the introduction of Symbols with Gravit 3.2 they will be imported in a flattened state, however.
New Assets and Design Templates
Getting started in Gravit Designer is now easier than ever. With the new design templates, from useful categories like Presentation, Poster or Blog Graphic, you can create awesome designs in no time. They all consist of various assets that you can also use separately.
These are the same assets you also have available in Klex, our easy to use and friendly design tool. With its powerful features and brilliant effects, Klex makes it easy to create stunning and memorable designs for your business, family and friends. So if you need a more accessible alternative to Gravit Designer, you can also open and modify the templates in Klex. But this is just the start of our unified design environment, so stay tuned for more in the future.
New Gradient Editor
Let’s be honest: editing gradients in Gravit wasn’t all that pleasant before. You could edit them on the canvas, but it was rather tedious. With our new gradient editor, you’ll love creating gradients again: you can change their color stops right on the canvas or add new ones with a single click. Time to create some rainbows with unicorns, happy kittens and all, people!
Video tutorials
We had the old documentation, and we had the blog, but nothing in between. People wanting more were in a state of limbo. Not so with Gravit 3.1: Now you can access a broad range of tutorials right from the app, starting from the very basics to more advanced topics like object management and effects. Watch them just for 10 minutes a day, and you’ll become a Gravit pro in no time.
Smaller File Sizes
What would a design be without images? Just that single huge hero graphic makes your mockup perfect. Images only have the bad habit to increase the file size of documents considerably. Not so with Gravit Designer 3.1: Our new file format makes your documents by about 300% smaller, so you can stow your external hard-drive away at last. Nice side effect: this also decreases the loading and saving time.
Furthermore, you now have the option to link raster images to a local file, so that they don’t interfere at all. You can do that from “File → Link Image” in the menu bar, which also makes sure that the image is kept up-to-date. Imagine that you have created a graphic in another application, that gets refreshed in Gravit Designer as soon as you save it there. Perfect use case! Please note that this feature is available to the desktop versions of Gravit Designer exclusively.
International Text Support
With a worldwide audience and a multitude of different languages and character sets, it’s never easy to cater for all circumstances. Gravit had a hard time especially with Cyrillic and Chinese characters as well as some from the Polish language. But we finally managed to reconcile. Now you can not only write these characters correctly but also rest assured that everything is exported as you see it in Gravit. Radujcie się obywatele polscy.
Chinese Version
Our Chinese users will notice with satisfaction that we went even a step further for them: Gravit has been fully localized for their home market. That includes not only the interface of the app but also the handling of Chinese text in designs. With Google’s Noto font you can directly input Chinese and Korean characters. We even created a custom website, just for you guys and girls. 奥地利的友好问候由中国.
Plugins
One of the most requested features finally comes to Gravit: Plugins. We know that these add-ons are vital for a thriving community, and we want to give you the tools to enhance Gravit in your very own way. Be it a tiny fix or a comprehensive enhancement — your own imagination is the limit, you have the entire code available. While you can’t install plugins yet, you can at least start developing them and fiddle about with the involved concepts. Interested in creating your own little helper for Gravit Designer? Get started on GitHub!
Improved SVG export
SVG, the rising star in the world of image formats. Don’t ever dare to create a website without at least 30 of them — of course, created in this alleged state-of-the-art tool (ahem, Gravit Designer). But we even improved: with the latest version, group and layer names are preserved as IDs, so that you can start utilizing them with CSS or JavaScript. Moreover, you can define the number of decimal places for values from 3 (default) to up to 6 in the export dialog, which results in a smaller file size.
Measurement guides
Designing is not all creativity alone but also takes a healthy portion of precision. Good that you can now display the distance between elements: select a layer, hold Alt and point to another one. Adding Ctrl/Cmd enables click-through and lets you dig into layout groups and show the spacing to a nested element. To trigger these measurement guides you don’t even need to stress your mouse hand: pressing Alt without a mouse movement also shows the distance to the edges of the page. There’s just one drawback (or advantage, depending on the perspective): this makes it even easier to blame a developer that something is ”just one pixel off.”
Bugfixes
A full list can be found here.
Other notables improvements
Fullscreen mode
Press Alt + Enter to hide all control elements (toolbar, layers panel, inspector panel) and bring your design into focus.
Improvements to Pages
Pages now have a slight shadow for enhanced visibility; they can be duplicated by holding Alt and dragging them to the side (Ctrl/Cmd + D works, too); the Page’s label can’t grow longer than the page itself and stays at a fixed size; and, most of all, you now can quickly switch between the different presets in the inspector.
More presets
Most notably more print presets (“A” sizes) and tablet sizes.
Change values in 0.1 steps
Within input fields, you now can hold Alt and use the Up and Down arrow keys to in- or decrement values in steps of 0.1.
Select layer
Performing a right-click on the canvas, with multiple elements underneath, shows the full layer hierarchy, including groups.
Klex is here!
By the way, before we close this informative bulletin; we have something else up our sleeves for you: Klex, our easy to use and friendly design tool. With its powerful features and brilliant effects, Klex makes it easy to create stunning and memorable designs for your business, family and friends. It’s entirely built on the Gravit engine, which makes it a snap to exchange files with Gravit Designer. Try it out, it’s completely free!
We hope that you find this update useful and it helps you to create even more amazing things in Gravit Designer. Please add a comment if you have questions or encounter any bugs with this release. We’re always there to help out and listen to feedback of our users.
Be sure to download Gravit Designer 3.1 from our website or update directly in the respective app stores (it may take up to 48h until the update is available there). Of course you can also use it online.
