Layout
Niice’s layout engine makes it easy to add context to your content & present your concepts clearly. Here’s how it works…
Drag & Drop
To move items around the board you simply drag & drop them, and Niice’s smart layout engine takes care of lining everything up.
Items will go as high up the board as there is room for them, so it’s usually easier to create layouts from top to bottom.
Columns & Gutters
You can adjust the number of columns and the size of the gutters in the style menu.
Columns
Columns provide the underlining ‘grid’ that everything on your board is aligned to. More columns provide you more options for your layout, but can require more work to create a balanced composition.
Gutters
Gutters are the space between the columns and images. You might be surprised how much of an impact they can have on the aesthetic of a board!
Crop & Scale
Cropping
To crop an item you can use the ‘crop handles’ on the bottom and right of the item. Clicking and dragging these will adjust the item’s height & width respectively.
If it’s an image or video, the preview will scale to fill the new ‘shape’. If it’s a text block, a scrollbar will appear when there isn’t enough room to see all the text at once. You can adjust the height of an item very precisely (unless autocrop is enabled), but the width will always ‘snap to’ the nearest column edge.
Scaling
You can scale items up in proportion by hitting the ‘enlarge’ button. This will scale the item up by one column. If you hold the ALT key, it turns the ‘Enlarge’ button into a ‘Reduce’ button, which when you hit it scales the item down by one column.
If your board has gutters, you can still make an item go ‘full-bleed’ (stretch edge-to-edge) by hitting ‘enlarge’ when the item is already taking up all the columns.
Autocrop
Autocrop is a bit magic. When enabled, it automatically ‘squares off’ items by rounding up their heights. You might want to leave it off if you’re presenting designs that can’t afford to have their edges cropped (like websites or posters), but otherwise it can be a huge time-saver.
Let’s face it, you have better things to do than line stuff up.
