We’ve made a few improvements to Masks for Image Placeholders to make them easier and faster to use.

You can now:

• See the applied mask clearly: The UI now makes it obvious when an image placeholder has a mask applied.

• Choose from pre-made shapes: Quickly apply shapes like circles, hearts, stars, and more as masks.

• Reuse your own shapes: Uploaded mask shapes are now saved to your account, so you can easily reuse them across different image placeholders.

These updates make it quicker to create custom image shapes and reuse your favorite masks across your designs.

You can now add Drop Shadows and Blurred Shadows to Image Uploads, giving you more control over how uploaded images look in your designs.

Just like with Text Shadows, you can customize:

• Color: Choose the shadow color option

• Offset: Control how far the shadow sits from the image

• Angle:Adjust the shadow direction

• Blur: Set how soft or sharp the shadow looks

Create subtle depth, stronger contrast, or more stylized effects, all directly from your image placeholder settings.

Crosswords have always been one of the most popular personalization formats on Customily, but until now, every tile looked the same, same background, same font, same color, no matter what the piece was for. Crosswords 2.0 changes that: merchants can now design tile styles that actually match the theme of the piece, and shoppers get to build genuinely distinctive, personal designs instead of a generic grid of letters.

Here's what's new. 🎨 Set your own tile styles

You can now define custom tile styles by combining an image, a font, and a font color. That's the building block for going thematic: a wood-grain tile with a rustic serif for a cabin-style piece, a pastel tile with a playful script for a nursery, a black tile with gold lettering for something more upscale. Build as many style combinations as your product line needs, directly from the Design Studio, no custom code required, and let the tile style do the work of setting the theme.

🛍️ Offer styles as shopper options

Once you've defined your tile styles, you can expose them as an option in the customizer. Shoppers pick the style that fits their taste, their season, or the theme they're building around, a holiday look, a sports theme, a wedding palette, the same way they'd pick a color or a font on any other personalized product. It's a simple way to turn a fixed design decision into something shoppers get to make themselves, and to let each order look like it was actually designed for the occasion.

🔀 Mix styles within the same design: Alternate mode

This is where 'all tiles the same' really goes out the window. With Alternate mode, merchants can decide to combine all of their defined tile styles so they alternate tile by tile across the same piece, no manual per-letter styling needed. A checkerboard of two colors, a wood tile next to a painted one, home team colors alternating with away team colors: the same crossword layout suddenly reads as a designed piece instead of a plain word grid.

🌍 No language limits

Because tile styles now include the font itself, Crosswords 2.0 removes language restrictions on the puzzle. Any font you assign to a tile style can render whatever characters it supports, so merchants selling to non-English-speaking markets, or shoppers personalizing in their own language, are no longer boxed in, as long as the font covers that language's characters.

The one caveat: the small Scrabble-style point number in the corner of each tile still needs to map to a letter value, and that mapping is language-specific. To keep that accurate, we support an extensive list of languages to choose from, so you can pick the one that matches your product and get correct scoring numbers automatically.

🚀Get started

Crosswords 2.0 is available now on existing and new crossword products. Head into the product editor to define your first tile styles, build a couple of themed sets, and turn Alternate mode on for any design that could use more than one look. The same crossword layout, styled differently, is a different product.

✨Here are some examples for inspiration

Now Image placeholder has setting to lock movement and/or scaling. this is useful to fix size and/or position. Dynamic image can be locked in scaling when movement is enabled.

Useful when:

• You want the shopper to be able to move the image but not resize it → use Lock Scaling.

• You want the shopper to be able to scale the image but keep it fixed in position → use Lock Movement.

• You want the image completely fixed — no moving, no resizing → enable both Lock Movement and Lock Scaling.

🔎 Find those settings under the Image Behavior section.

See them in action here:

Create repeating text patterns across the entire canvas in just a few clicks.

What's new

• Added a new Pattern section when selecting a Text Box element.

• Generate a pattern that automatically centers the selected text and fills the entire canvas with linked duplicates.

• Adjust the spacing between pattern instances to customize the layout.

• Use Refresh to Fill Page to regenerate missing instances after resizing the base element.

How it works

• Pattern instances stay linked to the original Text Box.

• Changes to the base element (text, colors, shadows, styling, etc.) are automatically applied to every instance in the pattern.

• During Step 1, pattern instances can't be edited individually to preserve the pattern.

• In Step 2, pattern instances become regular elements and can be moved, unlocked, or edited independently.

Current limitations

• Available only in Templates (Designs support coming soon).

• Supports regular Text Box elements only for now.

"One size does not fit all", and that's especially true for the Face Cutout effect. Faces with long hair, hats, or voluminous styles result in different face sizes and positions once the shopper uploads their photo.

That's all in the past. The Face Cutout effect now includes a Smart Face Placement feature that automatically adjusts the face position and size to fit your design perfectly.

This means:

• ✅ A better shopper experience out of the box.

• ✅ Fewer fulfillment adjustments on your end.

• ✅ Less risk of returns due to unexpected result.

It works with:

• 🌐 All platforms

• ✂️ Face Cutout by Customily — FREE

• ✂️ Face Cutout by Cutout Pro

How to set it up.

1. Turn on 'Smart Face Placement' in the Face Cutout effect.

2. Adjust the image's Size and Position to match the facial area placeholder.

3. Test with several photos and fine-tune until you find the optimal size and position for your design.