Designer home page changes are a welcome improvement

The Microsoft Designer home page has a major update that highlights some of its hidden features. These changes aren’t just cosmetic, but are a welcome boost to the functionality and usability of the opening page.

The new Designer home page is in two parts: Get Started and My Projects.

Get Started

Get Started has links to Designer features including some that were available before but needed workarounds to reach.  The clever image editing features; Generative Erase, Remove and Blur Background are now directly accessible from the Designer opening page.

You have to scroll down to see all the options because each is promoted with a large graphic, so here’s a fast summary of what’s on the page.

Design Creator

This opens a new design project, in effect the old Designer home page.

Image Creator

Now there’s a direct link to making an image from text or what Designer calls ‘Generate Image’.

Any images made will appear in the Designer ‘My Media’ page or can be copied to clipboard or downloaded right away.

The Office Watch ebook Microsoft Designer: Straight Talk has a whole chapter about Image Creator under the heading Generate Images.

Generative Erase

Let’s you upload a photo into Designer then go straight to the Generative Erase option to cleverly remove elements from a photo and replace.

Remove Background

Upload a photo and go straight to the Remove Background part of Designer.

Blur Background

Finally, another direct path to a Designer photo editing feature, this time Blur Background.

Any of the images uploaded to Erase, Remove or Blur Background can be used in a design or downloaded again to use in any other place (document, email, slide, sheet, parchment <g>).

Anyone with the ebook Microsoft Designer: Straight Talk can learn more about these and other Image editing tools in detail, check out the Images chapter.

Brand Kit Creator

Designer already has Brand Kits, a collection of font, logo and colors that you can apply to any design for consistency.

The Brand Kit Creator adds AI magic to this feature. Type in a description of the brand e.g “Brand kit for bunny rabbit boarding school”,  “… for Sherlock Holmes Appreciation Society” or  “… for evil plan to take over the world”

Designer will make up logos, fonts and colors that you can choose from. Also setup what Microsoft calls a ‘Brand Voice’, a short description of the brand feel or tone which can be included when generating images, text, captions and hashtags.

Brand Kit Creator is rolling out now but you might need to wait until after Thanksgiving for it to appear in your browser.

Templates aka Designs for social media and more

At the very bottom is a selection of Designer templates plus a link to the wider range of Office document templates at Microsoft Create.

My Projects

This is a larger, easier to view list of your past design projects plus a ‘New Project’ button at top-right.