I recently inherited a website where the previous developer was using Fancy Product Designer to create custom aprons for radiation protection. After reviewing the community forums and plugin documentation, I see that the plugin has a lot of capabilities and potential to create a great user experience. However, the way that the former developer of the site set it up is not ideal. If you go to this product page and select the lead type and size and then hit "Design your own" you'll see what I mean. 

The UI composer is basically completely unusable on mobile, the static image with directions at the bottom doesn't make sense, and overall the experience is very confusing. I saw Custom Ink's website in another forum post and I love what they did with the layout composer. Does anybody have any suggestions for what settings need to be updated / where I should get started in improving this? 

Graphcom,

May I ask how many products you have/plan to have?

And designs?

This really does not answer my question. The canvas is wider than it is tall, which is not accurate to how most people user their mobile devices. 

I want to create a better mobile experience, but there doesn't appear to be any documentation on the website for how to do so. Many of the demos on the site function well and the layouts actually change for mobile (like this one https://fancyproductdesigner.com/product/shirts/ - see screenshots as well)

Can you please outline the steps I need to take to make my site function like this? 

I went ahead and enabled sidebar right instead of off-canvas like you suggested. It looks much better on mobile now, but now I am experiencing a whole other issue. My problem is explained in detail via the video below. A quick summary is that when I resize my UI composer, suddenly none of my designs are fitting in the composer any more. When I try to change the settings on my designs, none of them are updating. Either there is something wrong with the plugin, or there is something overriding my settings, and I don't understand what it could be. I am on a tight client deadline and really need to get this figured out asap so that I can update all my products and designs as needed... please, any help as soon as possible would be greatly appreciated. 

Check out this video: https://embed.vidyard.com/share/YvjkuM8SwXVxYqqmrMVWqj?

Thanks! It's looking much better now. 

I have one more question - for some reason when you click & drag on the builder you are able to move layers around. See this quick video:

Check out this video: https://embed.vidyard.com/share/mYqFYztXNMg3J7vpnBXb2o?

I don't want this to be able to happen. I've checked my settings, and "draggable" is set to off. I also locked my layers in the product builder. Why is this happening / how can I fix it?

Thanks!

I have about 30 products and countless designs - at least 50 or 60 

Well, 50-60 design CATEGORIES. Designs themselves.... hundreds, maybe over a thousand. 

It appears to me that you can only change the canvas width in the product builder for ALL devices. There is no option for desktop vs. mobile. 

Literally all I want to do is just make the image fill the space on a mobile device. It's so simple - there must be a way to do this without creating duplicates of ALL the products and designs. Please see this video and let me know if you can help me. 

https://share.vidyard.com/watch/WtkT7th65Vux66JqK4tnWQ?

What do I need to do for each product individually?!

As I said, the mobile preview is the wrong orientation - it is wider than it is tall. How do I adjust this?

Hello Graphcom,

This plugin is really awesome. That is for sure. But there are a number of little... quirks that you have to work around. Mostly, you need to make sure the graphics used to create the product in FPD are done right. I have had to go back to make revisions to the graphics of most of my products several times. How good are you with PhotoShop and Illustrator? I pretty much build the product in Illustrator and then export the layers that I need (background/canvas mask, cut and bleed lines, etc.) and build the product in FPD

Your issue with the canvas being wider than it is tall and the instructions being at the bottom, look to be the way the graphics were designed before they were added to the product builder. My recommendations are as follows:

- You will need to re-create the graphics used to make the product so that the main canvas background image is the size and aspect ratio you want (Remove the empty white space on the sides.) This will fix the aspect ratio, but If you do this right, you could also have one version that is *close enough* to being fine for both mobile and desktop.

- Set the canvas size in the Product Builder for each Product (Fancy Product Designer > Products.) You can set it per view if you need to, but I would keep the canvas size for each view of a product the same. Do not set the global canvas size value if you don't need to. That caused problems for me. For my products, the canvas size is set to the size of my background/canvas mask graphic.

- For mobile friendliness... that's a tough one and I haven't figured out the best way to do this so if you find anything, let me know.

-  -  Radykal suggests having two FPD Products for each physical product you sell - a desktop version and a mobile version. While this is a pain in the ass, it is actually a better bet than trying to make one product fit on all screen sizes - a well known nightmare for developers and web designers.

-  -  a quick change that should help is to make sure you have set FPD to be responsive in Fancy Product Designer > Settings > Advanced > Miscellaneous. This wont be a magical fix, but it definitely helps.

Here is a screenshot showing the responsive setting and a couple other settings that have helped me out a lot:

http://prntscr.com/nmvhsf

I hope  this was helpful. FPD can be a pain to work with, but it really is an awesome plugin. Good luck!

Best Regards,

Tyler