The Editor

This is the heart of Brilliant: the canvas where you draw, and the four toolbars that surround it. This page is the map. It names every region, explains the two things that surprise people coming from other tools (per-canvas undo and no save button), and links out to a page for each part of the editor.

If you have never opened Brilliant before, start with the Quick Tour instead. This page assumes you have the app open and want to know where things are.

The Brilliant editor with the four toolbars around the canvas (screenshot coming soon)

The four toolbars

Brilliant frames the canvas with one toolbar on each edge. Learn what each is for and you always know where to look.

• Top toolbar: the breadcrumb for the active canvas, as workspace / folder / canvas. Double-click the canvas name to rename it.

• Left toolbar: your project tree and layer list. The top half lists every canvas in the document; the bottom half lists every element in the active canvas, nested the way the canvas nests.

• Right toolbar: the property inspector. Its contents follow your selection (fill, stroke, effects, typography, layout, frame properties, and so on). With nothing selected, it shows document-level settings.

• Bottom toolbar: the tool switcher on the left, and the AI chat input, one / away, on the right.

• Canvas: everything else. This is where you design.

You can hide any edge to reclaim space: ⌘⇧ArrowLeft for the left toolbar, ⌘⇧ArrowRight for the right, ⌘⇧ArrowDown for the bottom. ⌘\ hides all UI at once for a clean look at your work.

Everything is a search away

The single shortcut worth learning first is ⌘K. It opens a global palette that finds and runs anything: commands, canvases, layers, fonts, and chats. Forget where a feature lives? Open the palette, type a few letters, press Enter. Every shortcut in this section is also reachable this way, so you never have to memorize more than you want to.

Where everything lives

Each part of the editor gets its own page:

• Tools: every drawing and editing tool, its shortcut, and its modifiers.

• Selection and editing: selecting, moving, resizing, rotating, aligning, and Brilliant's per-frame selection model.

• Frames and auto layout: frames versus groups, auto layout, sizing modes, layout grids, and masks.

• Color and fills: the color picker, top to bottom, plus every fill type from solids to gradients to shaders.

• Strokes and effects: stroke options, shadows, glows, blurs, blend modes, and opacity.

• Text: creating text, sizing modes, typography, and per-range styling.

• Vectors: the pen and pencil, vector edit mode, nodes and handles, and boolean operations.

• Canvas navigation: zoom, pan, rulers, guides, and the canvas backdrops.

Undo is per canvas

Every canvas keeps its own undo history. Switch to another canvas, make changes, come back, and your first canvas still has its full history waiting: nothing is shared or clobbered across canvases. Switching canvases is itself never an undoable step.

• ⌘Z undoes.

• ⌘⇧Z redoes.

Undo covers your edits and the AI's alike, so experiment freely and roll back what you do not like.

Your files save themselves

There is no save button, and you never need one. Every change is written to the .design file on disk the moment it happens, so closing the app or losing power costs you nothing. The document name in the top toolbar always reflects what is on disk.

Because .design files are plain-text YAML, they drop cleanly into git. You can branch designs, review them in pull requests, and git blame a stray color change the same way you would with code.

Next

• Meet the tools: Tools.

• Learn the selection model: Selection and editing.

• Design with AI: Built-in AI.