The habit
You have opened a template and discovered it was a picture. The headline was outlined, or it was a JPEG, or it was a text frame linked to a font the template downloaded only while you were online. Illustrator's stock templates and Photoshop's cloud documents train that disappointment. You wanted to change the date. You got a flatten, or a missing-font dialog, or a spinner because the machine was on a train.
Affinity's templates are closer to real documents when they are local files you already saved. The habit you want is that, from the first open. Paper you can resize the content on. Shapes you can recolor one by one. Words you can rewrite with the Type tool. No account. No request out to a font server. The file is unsaved until you decide it is a job, so browsing a start does not litter your disk with fifty-two "Untitled" files you never meant to keep.
The other habit is the tab. You are mid-poster. You want to steal a structure from the gallery. The gallery must not eat the poster. New tab. Old tab still dirty, still there, still undoable.
The constraint
The 52 ship inside the app. Fonts come from the local system. The bank does not download fonts and it does not redistribute fonts. If a face is not installed on this machine, the template cannot conjure it from a CDN. That is the offline rule, and it is also the license rule. You work with the faces the computer already has. Project fonts in a brand kit are a different feature, for a job that has already decided to carry its own TTF and OTF files. The gallery itself does not reach for them over the network. There is no network step in opening a card.
One .oma per document, unsaved until you save. A template is not a linked smart object back to the gallery. Edits stay in the new document. The gallery's copy of Palm House stays the gallery's copy. Undo in the new tab is that tab's undo. It does not rewind someone else's open file.
The layouts cannot be one design scaled blindly. Portrait, square, and landscape pages have distinct artwork and distinct arrangements. A wide page is composed as a wide page. A tall page is composed as a tall page. A square is composed as a square. Custom sizes reflow into that system. Very tiny sizes omit secondary copy that would be unreadable. Keeping a line that has collapsed into grit is not a usable page. The omission is the layout decision for that size.
Existing work stays in its tab because the studio is a document app, not a single canvas. You can hold the job and the candidate start at the same time. Save the one you mean. Close the one you do not.
What landed
A template opens as an unsaved document. The layers you get are the layers you edit: paper, artwork, and copy. Paper is the page. Artwork is the vector construction, shapes you can select, recolor, duplicate, and delete. Copy is live type. Double-click it and type. The first keystroke replaces a placeholder the way type works everywhere else in Design. Dates, venues, and sample business lines are creative placeholders. Change them before you publish. They were written for the bank. They are not your event.
The document you already had open stays in its tab. The template does not replace it, does not merge into it, and does not force a save dialog on it. You can look at a start, decide it is wrong, close the new tab, and land back on the job. If you never saved the template tab, nothing was written.
Fonts are the local fonts. Open the file on a train, on a machine with no network, in a room that blocks the obvious ports. The card still opens. The type still uses faces this computer can draw. The bank does not fetch a family to complete the look. If you need a face that is not installed, install it on the system, or bring it in later through a project typography kit as a file you copied yourself. The template open does not do that for you.
Portrait, square, and landscape are separate compositions across the 52. Pick a built-in size or a custom width, height, and DPI in the gallery, and the preview adapts before you commit. The file you then get matches that preview, including the decision to drop unreadable secondary copy at very small sizes. You are not handed a full text stack shrunk until it turns to grit. The primary lines remain. The lines that cannot survive the size are gone, on purpose.
Thirteen artwork families, 52 compositions, all local. The weekly sequence in the drop plan is an editorial order and a remix prompt per design. It does not delay a file. Week 40 is not a release gate. Local Network is in the gallery today if the category is community and the idea is a group of businesses.
Everything in the new tab is ordinary document content. Recolor a leaf on its own. Duplicate a petal and move it. Rewrite a two-word manifesto. The pathfinder, the type panel, the swatches, the undo stack: they are the same tools as any .oma you drew from scratch. Save and you have a normal project file. The template gallery has no claim on it.
In the hand
Open Templates · 52 from + Vector or from File → Template library. Choose the proportions. Double-click the card.
Look at the tab bar. The old document is still named there. The new tab has no filename yet. Click a word.
T
Type the real headline. Press Esc or click away to finish the text edit. Select a shape. Change its fill from the swatch or the inspector. Select another shape and change that one alone. The construction is not a single flattened group you have to release before you can recolor a part. Where a group exists, it behaves like any group: double-click in to edit a child.
Try this on a machine with the network off. The document is already open. No font fetch starts. No "sign in to load this template" appears. The faces are the local faces.
Make the size small on a second try. Open the gallery again, enter a tiny width and height, and watch the preview. Secondary copy that would not read is omitted. Create that document only if the remaining type is the type you want. The full wording still exists on the larger sizes. Pick the size that matches the slot.
When the tab is good, Ctrl+S and name the .oma. When it is not, close the tab and discard. The gallery is unchanged. The other document is unchanged. Its undo stack is its own.
The edge
A template refuses the network. No font download, no account, no remote card. Local faces only. It refuses to overwrite the gallery when you edit, and it refuses to touch the tab you already had open.
At very small sizes it refuses to keep secondary copy you could not read. The preview shows that omission. Choose a larger size if you need those lines.
Double-click the card. The unsaved tab is editable paper, artwork, and type, and the job you were in is still the other tab.
The thread
Part 88 of 144 in the Omadesign 0.5.8 feature thread.