By the end of this page you will have one finished file on your own device: a picture for the noticeboard, a PDF for the printer or a vector a print shop can use at any size. You need no account, no design training and nothing set up first, and after your first visit it all works with the internet off.
Open the app and you land on the gallery - every tool as a card. Click one and it opens in two halves: the controls down one side, a live preview on the other. Change a control and the preview changes as you type, and what the preview shows is what the file will be.
A few things save time before you start:
- The little pictures on a card are a shortcut. Where a card shows a strip of small examples, click the one you like and the tool opens already filled in with exactly that look. Changing a few words beats starting from nothing.
- Getting the file out is the same move every time. Press Export on the Export | Save pill - at the foot of the controls on a computer, floating at the bottom of the screen on a phone. Pick a format at the top of the panel that opens (it lists only the ones that tool makes), then press Download.
- Or skip the download. Copy, in the same panel, puts the picture straight on your clipboard to paste into a message. The full format list is in Exporting and formats.
Three ordinary jobs follow. Pick the one that sounds like yours.
A code for the invitation
A square code people point a phone at: on a party invite, a noticeboard poster or a card on your stall.
- Open QR Code Generator from the gallery, or type
qrin the search box to find it. - Put the web address in URL - the map, the sign-up form, your shop page.
- Set Module color and Background to the two colours already on the invitation.
- Leave Quiet zone at 4. That is the plain margin a phone camera needs to find the code, so scan it yourself before you print anything.
- Export, choose SVG for print or PNG for a screen, then Download.
About twenty seconds, once you have the web address to hand.
If the code is going somewhere it might get scuffed or rained on, set Error correction to High (30%) first. It packs in enough spare information that a damaged code still reads.
Feeling shy? Your voice is plenty
A voice note becomes a finished video: a moving waveform, your words on the cover, your colours. No camera, no makeup needed.
- Open Audiogram and drop your recording into Audio - a voice memo from your phone works as it is.
- Type the Title and Subtitle - the episode name, who is speaking, the date.
- Pick a Style for the waveform - bars, a ring, a wave - and press play to watch it move with the sound.
- Export, choose MP4 for most places or WebM, then Download.
A couple of minutes, most of it listening back to your own clip.
The same file also exports as plain audio (MP3, M4A) or a still cover (PNG), so one recording covers the podcast feed, the social post and the artwork without touching another tool.
A photo, ready for the poster
One photo, treated so it prints well and matches everything else you have made.
- Open Filter. Under Image, press Choose asset… and pick a photo, or Upload your own… to use one from your device.
- Pick an Effect: Halftone breaks the photo into printed dots, Colour treatment re-lays it in two flat colours and Posterize flattens it into a few blocks of tone.
- Work the sliders that appear under it. On Halftone, Grid size sets how far apart the dots sit and Dot size how fat each one gets.
- Open the Colour section and nudge Contrast and Saturation until the picture reads clearly from across a room.
- Export. Pick PNG for anything, or SVG on an effect badged vector so it stays sharp at poster size. Then Download.
About a minute, most of it spent choosing the photo.
Click down the Effect list once to see what your own photo does under each. There are seven, and they look very different on a face, a building and a plate of food.
Send it or keep it
- Send it. Every control you touched is written into the page address, so Share in the export panel hands you a link that reopens the same design on someone else's screen. One thing it does not carry: a photo you uploaded from your own device stays there. See Using Lolly: Sharing your work.
- Keep it. Save, the tick beside Export, stores what you typed as a session you reopen with Continue on the tool's card, and it stays on your device. See Using Lolly: Saving and continuing.
Between them that covers most of day one: hand the finished thing to someone and be able to change a date on it next month without building it again.
Make it wear your colours
Everything above works before you have told Lolly a thing about yourself. The second visit's job is to hand it your colours and your fonts once, so every tool arrives already filled in with them and you stop typing the same hex code into every field. The Quickstart walks that through, starting from a single colour it builds a full palette out of.
This is polish, not a prerequisite. The codes, names and posters you made today go on working exactly as they are, and nothing you make is waiting on a setting you have not found yet.
When you want the rest of what the app does - the other tools, printing properly, video, doing fifty of something at once - Lolly for Creators is the tour. Using Lolly is the practical manual for driving the app once it is open.