Curved Text

Curved texts let you add text along a circle or ellipse to your designs, whether it's fixed text or something shoppers can personalize. The curved text sets the path and boundaries where text can be typed, and is represented on the canvas by a circle or ellipse with the text on it.

You can customize the font, size, color, alignment, and styling to control how the text looks.

How It Works

When you add a curved text to your design, it's personalizable by default.

• Shoppers see a text input where they can enter their own text.

• As they type, their text appears live in the product preview.

• If you offer multiple fonts or colors, shoppers can choose between them.

• You can make the text fixed, so it appears in the design without being editable by shoppers.

To add a curved text

You can add curved text on Designs and on Templates, by clicking the curved text button.

Each curved text that you add will have a Name that you can edit, and a Unique Id for you to easily identify it. 

Make text fixed or personalizable

By default, every curved text you add is personalizable, meaning shoppers can change its content when customizing a product.

If you want to display fixed text that shoppers cannot edit, you can disable personalization for that element.

To make a curved text fixed:

1. Select the curved text element.

2. Find the Personalizable setting.

3. Disable Personalizable.

To make the text personalizable again, simply enable the setting.

How to move, resize and transform the curved text

You can move, resize, and rotate the curved text directly on the canvas.

When you select it, a quick-action toolbar appears below it, with shortcuts to duplicate, delete, align, and distribute elements.

For more precise adjustments, expand the Transform toolbox. Use these controls to adjust the curved texts position, rotation, size, skew, flip, and layer order.

For detailed instructions on each transformation, see 📄 Transforming an element.

How to style and format the text

Select the curved text element and expand the Character toolbox to customize its font, size, alignment, tracking, string, side, and other formatting options.

Font Option

You can apply one or multiple fonts to a text element.

1. Select the text element

2. Expand the Character toolbox

3. Click to expand the Select a Font list

4. Pick a font from the list

New accounts will just have a couple fonts available. You can easily add as many fonts as you want to your font list.

To learn how to add your own fonts see 📄 Upload custom fonts

Tip

You can add multiple font options to a curved text element by using a Font Library or clicking + Add font option to select additional fonts.

For detailed instructions, see 📄 Text with multiple font options.

Font Size

Curved texts in Customily have a font size range, meaning you can set a minimum and a maximum font size. This is to allow text to resize when customers type something super long (making the text smaller to fit more characters).

We recommend using the Max Size as the size that you want. The Min Size will be the limit of the resizing, to ensure that small texts still look good and are printable, leaving the value that comes by default is a great choice. If you don't want the text to be able to resize at all, you should use the same value on both.

1. Select the curved text

2. Expand the Character toolbox

3. Type in the Max (and Min if desired) font size in points (pts)

Alignment

You can align a text along the path string:

• Left, Center, Right, Justified

1. Select the curved text element

2. Expand the Character toolbox

3. Select from the dropdown the Alignment

Tracking

You can adjust the tracking (character spacing) of your text by inputting the value. I is expressed in %.

1. Select the curved text element

2. Expand the Character toolbox

3. Type in the value in %

Text String length

The text string is the portion of the path where the text can be written. It marks the beginning and the end of the text. You can adjust both the start and end of the string to limit the path where the text can be written.

1. Select the curved text element

2. Expand the Character toolbox

3. Type in a value for the String Start and String End. You can also adjust the text string by using the string handles on the workspace.

Text Side

The text side will determine where the text is positioned along the path if it's on its concave or convex side. 

1. Select the curved text element

2. Expand the Character toolbox

3. Select from the dropdown the Side

All Caps

By checking All Caps, you'll force whatever text a customer types into capital letters.

1. Select the text element

2. Expand the Character toolbox

3. Click the All caps checkbox

How to apply color and outlines

Select the curved text and expand the Color toolbox to customize its fill color and stroke.

Fill Color

You can apply one or multiple fill colors to a curved text. You can assign colors by Hex value, RGB-A, CMYK-A, or by using a color picker. The color chart will change from RGB-A to CMYK-A, according to the color mode of your workspace. The A stands for Alpha, which means you can also add transparency to your text colors!

To set the fill color:

1. Select the curved text element

2. Expand the Color toolbox

3. Click the color swatch or the pencil to select a color.

4. Using the swatch you can add colors with Hex, RGB-A, or CMYK-A values (the last 2 depend on the color mode of your design). You can also use the color picker to choose a color from your screen. If you want to add transparency, just slide the Alpha control on the bottom of the chart.

5. Click Apply

Tip

You can add multiple color options to a text element by using a Color Library or clicking +Add color option to select additional colors.

For detailed instructions, see 📄 Text with multiple color options

Stroke

You can apply a colored stroke to the curved text, this can be a different color from the fill color. The stroke will apply to the text always, so if you have multiple font options and multiple color options, the stroke will apply to all of them.

1. Select the curved text.

2. Expand the Color toolbox.

3. Under Stroke, click Add Stroke.

4. Adjust the stroke width and choose its color. You can add multiple colors if needed.

Tip

You can add multiple color options to the stroke by using a Color Library or clicking +Add color option to select additional colors.

For detailed instructions, see 📄 Text with multiple color options

Advanced text settings

Select the text element and expand the Advanced toolbox to configure additional text behaviors such as adding fixed words and symbols.

Add fixed words and symbols

Use these settings to add text or symbols that appear automatically alongside the text entered by the shopper. These additions stay fixed and cannot be edited by the shopper.

• Prefix

  Adds text or symbols before the personalized text. For example, entering Est. displays Est. 1985 when the shopper enters "1985".

• Suffix

  Adds text or symbols after the personalized text. For example, entering Family displays Johnson Family when the shopper enters "Johnson".

• Between Characters

  Adds a character or symbol between each letter. For example, entering · displays J·O·H·N instead of "JOHN".

• Between Words

  Adds a character or symbol between words. For example, entering ♥ displays John ♥ Smith instead of "John Smith".

To add fixed words or symbols:

1. Select the text element

2. Expand the Advanced toolbox

3. Enter the text or symbol in the corresponding field.

Test how the shopper experience will look

At any moment while configuring your curved text, you can test how it will look on your design, by typing on the spot that reads Type to try the text box.

This is just for you to test, whatever you type there won't be saved, and won't be visible to your customers, unless you have checked make text fixed.