Printing Areas – Defining Print-Ready Customization Zones

Why defining the print output matters

When designing customizable products, there is an important gap between how products are customized and how they are produced:

• Customizations in Fancy Product Designer are created in pixels
• Printing, however, happens in physical units like millimeters or inches
• Without a defined print output, it is impossible to reliably translate a digital design into a printable result

In addition, unrestricted design freedom causes practical issues:

• Customers may place elements outside of printable areas
• Important constraints (seams, edges, holes, curves) are ignored
• Uploaded images may be too low-resolution for the intended print size

To solve these problems, Fancy Product Designer introduces Printing Areas.

What are Printing Areas?

As you will know, when you have used Fancy Product Designer before in Shopify, we worked with a so-called Printing Box before to solve this issue. Printing Areas are just an Upgrade to this.

Printing Areas define dedicated zones on a product where customers are allowed to customize the product. Based on those areas, you can export a print file with all those different areas after the customer's order is placed.

Each printing area has:

• A defined physical size (mm or inch)
• A position and size on the view of a customization, which leads to clear mapping between pixels and real-world dimensions
• Optional bleed settings to compensate for imprecise printing or cutting

Customers can upload images and add text to the print areas and position the scaled elements in them freely. This also allows Fancy Product Designer to validate image resolution against real print size.

Customer added elements **always **belong to one print area.

How to setup print areas?

1. Open a view of a customization in the Product Builder.
2. Select View Options in the right sidebar menu.
3. In the "Add Print Area" Form define width, height and if needed the bleed. (You can't change this afterward, but you can always create a new print area.)
4. Select the "Position and Resize" modus for the printing area (the button left of the delete button) and adjust it to your needs.

• As all print areas are placed on the same view they should all have the same pixel to inch ratio (canvas density).
• Don't worry about the canvas density - it's irrelevant for the print quality.

Now you as a merchant can place elements inside a print area. Just select the print area and add the element. This is useful if you want to provide the customer with an example text or image to get them going. This element will also be restricted to only be inside the print area.

How does it look like?

One great thing about print areas is you can have more then one. This is great for products with multiple editing areas on the same view. Your customers can select which print area they want to add elements to by checking the box in the top right corner of the area.

You can also adjust the look of the print areas using our Customization Profiles. In there, you can change the color of the bleed or the crop marks. You can also hide them completely. Here you can find more information about the Customizations Profiles, and how to set different settings for specific products or groups of products.

What about Printing Boxes?

You have been using the Fancy Product Designer for while and you already have customizations with Printing Boxes? No problem! They are automatically converted into Printing Areas and they still look the same for your customers.

Updated on: 07/01/2026