Signage Templates

A signage template describes the layout of a sign — where the hole number, map, notes, QR code, and logos sit, and how big each part is. It contains no course data of its own: when a template is applied to a sign, Parkdly fills it with that sign's real data (hole numbers, pars, distances, layouts, notes), and your course Theme provides the colors and fonts — though a template can pin individual blocks to a font of their own (see Fonts). One template can therefore drive every sign on a course, and a theme change restyles them all without touching the layout.

Parkdly ships a set of built-in templates. Custom templates let you design your own — starting from a built-in or from a blank canvas — in the template studio, reachable from Templates in the studio's top bar.

Create a template

The New template button opens a short wizard with three steps:

Type — the template's name, and whether it's a tee sign (one sign per hole) or an info board (one sign for the whole course).
Shape — portrait or landscape, and the aspect ratio, listed with the print sizes each one covers (A-series is A4/A3/A5; Letter is 8.5×11 in). Pick the shape you print at and the rest of the editor speaks in that shape's units. You can change it later in the editor's shape settings.
Start — a blank canvas, or one of the built-in templates as your starting point.

Starting from a built-in is usually the faster route: everything is already laid out and you only adjust what you care about — "the Parkdly look, but with our logo bigger". A blank canvas gives you an empty sign to add blocks to, including the map.

You can also copy a built-in directly: every built-in template card has a Copy button that drops an editable copy into My templates, skipping the wizard.

Whatever you start from, the copy is yours — editing it never touches the built-in it came from.

The editor

Opening a template lands you in the template editor: the block palette and layers list on the left, your design in the middle, and the settings of whatever you've selected on the right. Changes save automatically — the header shows Saving… / Saved.

Blocks

Everything on a sign is a block: the hole number, the map area, notes, the QR code, sponsor logos, and so on. Add one by dragging it from the palette onto the sign — drop it inside a Box to place it in that Box. If you'd rather not drag, click a palette tile to arm it and then click the canvas to place it; Esc cancels.

Each block knows its job: the Hole Number block always shows the hole's number, the Notes block always shows the sign's notes. You choose where things go and how they look; the data fills itself in.

Right-click a block — on the canvas or in the layers list — for its quick actions.

A block with many settings keeps the everyday ones in front and tucks the rest behind an Advanced toggle in its settings panel — the Hole Summary block, for example, shows its three table colors up front, with the border color, corner style, and sizing limits under Advanced.

Colors

A block's colors come from your theme rather than a free-form color picker, so a template stays consistent with whatever theme the course uses. Pick the text and foreground colors from the theme's tokens; the editor shows live contrast guidance against whatever the block actually sits on, so you can tell at a glance whether text will be readable once printed.

Fill colors — a Box's surface, a badge's card — also offer a Transparent swatch (the slashed circle). A transparent fill paints nothing, letting whatever is behind show through, while the block's other parts still draw: a Box with a transparent surface and a border becomes an outlined frame over the panel behind it. Text and icon colors never offer Transparent — invisible text is never what you want.

Every control you see for a selected block does something visible. If a color choice currently paints nothing (for example, a layout's own color is being used instead), the picker dims and explains why.

Fonts

Text renders in your theme's font by default. Every block that shows text also offers a Font control in its Text settings: leave it on Theme font (default) to follow the theme, or pick a font to pin that block to it regardless of what theme the course uses. The list previews each choice in its own typeface, and only offers fonts that render the same on screen and in the exported PDF.

Because templates are chosen per sign, a font override is also how you give a single sign different typography: put the override in a template and apply that template to just that sign. Text sizes and colors are simpler — those you can override on a single sign directly from the signage editor's Theme tab, no template needed.

The Box

The Box is the container block. Putting blocks inside a Box stacks them together, and the Box provides the panel behind them — background fill, border, rounded corners, padding. Rounded corners (under Options) lets you toggle each of the Box's four corners on or off individually — so two stacked panels can meet flush, with the top panel rounded only on top, the bottom one only on the bottom, and a square seam between them. The Map Area block has the same Rounded corners control, so the map window can sit flush against a neighboring panel too. Any block can be wrapped in a Box with one click (Wrap in Box in its right-click menu), which is how you give a hole number or a notes panel a colored card behind it. You can also drag a block from the palette straight into an existing Box.

Two settings turn the Box into a real layout tool:

Direction (under Arrange contents): Stack places blocks top to bottom, Row places them side by side.
Content (under Size): Fill area keeps the Box the size you drew it; Fit content shrinks its height to what's inside — a Stack fits the sum of its blocks, a Row fits its tallest one — and Pin to chooses which edge the fitted content sticks to.

When a Box is set to Fit content, each block inside sizes to its own content — so the per-block size options don't apply (there's no spare space to divide), and the editor doesn't show them. If you need a block at an exact size, leave the Box on Fill area, where Fill the leftover space, Fit to content, and Fixed size all take effect.

Panels that disappear when there's nothing to show

Not every hole has notes, and not every course has sponsors. Hide when empty (under Options, on by default) drops a Box off the printed sign when everything inside it is empty — so a hole without notes gets clean space instead of an empty panel.

A Box only disappears when all of its content is empty, which is why a panel with an icon next to its notes never vanishes: the icon is always there. Under the toggle, what counts as content here lists the Box's blocks. Untick the icon and it becomes decoration — it still shows whenever the panel does, but it no longer keeps the panel on the sign. Now the whole thing, icon included, disappears on a hole with no notes.

Two things to know:

Untick on the blocks directly inside the Box you want to disappear. If an icon sits in its own small Box, untick that Box, not the icon inside it.
If nothing is ticked, the panel has no content to show and never appears — the editor warns you when that happens.

While you're editing, a panel that would disappear is drawn as a dashed outline reading Nothing to show, so you can still see and select it. Switch the Test data panel's notes off to check how the design looks on a hole without them.

Sizes are real, in your units

Padding, gaps, borders and radii are shown as real physical sizes at your chosen print size — millimetres on A-series sheets, inches on US sizes like Letter or 18 × 24. Pick the size you actually print on from the preview-size selector and the numbers you see are the numbers you'll measure on the finished sign.

Templates are scale-free: the same design prints correctly at any size, keeping its proportions. Changing the print size never changes the design — it only changes the ruler.

Shapes and preview sizes

A template has a native shape (its aspect ratio), chosen in the wizard and changeable in the shape settings. The catalog covers A-series (A4, A3, A5), US Letter and Legal, and the common poster ratios — 4:5 (8×10, 16×20 in), 3:4 (9×12, 18×24 in) and 2:3 (12×18, 24×36 in). Horizontal templates also offer the DiscGolfPark 520 × 400 mm holder shape. The print sizes offered for a template are the ones that actually match its shape.

A template can also preview in other shapes to check the design still holds — useful when some of your signs are square or banner-shaped. The Shape preview chip above the canvas reminds you when you're looking at a non-default shape.

Allowing more than one shape

By default a sign using your template renders at the template's native shape, and the sign's Aspect Ratio selector doesn't appear — your design is only guaranteed at the shape you drew it at, so Parkdly doesn't offer to reflow it into shapes you haven't looked at.

To offer more, tick them under Also allow in the shape settings. Preview each one first (that's what the shape preview is for), and the shapes you allow become the choices on the sign itself: assign the template to a tee sign or info board, and its Aspect Ratio selector lists exactly those.

This is the one way custom templates differ from the built-ins, which ship with every standard shape already allowed.

Layout intent

The palette's "This sign is for" choice tells the editor whether the sign serves one layout, several layouts sharing hole numbers, or several layouts with different numbers. It filters which blocks fit: for example, a single big Hole Number doesn't make sense when every layout renumbers its holes — the palette disables it and says why, and the Hole Info block (which shows each layout on its own row) takes its place.

Preview with real data

By default the preview fills your design with sample data. The Test data panel lets you swap that for one of your own signs — pick any tee sign or info board from your projects and the preview renders your template with that sign's real hole, notes, QR code, sponsors and layout colors. It's the fastest way to find out whether a design survives your actual course rather than tidy placeholder text.

The same panel switches the sample between typical, sparse, and stress-test data, so you can check how the design behaves with long names, many layouts, or missing notes.

One thing stays a placeholder here: the course map, which shows as a marked-up box rather than your real holes. Everything around it is real, so you can size and position the map area confidently — apply the template to a sign to see it drawn in.

Edit the template as JSON (advanced)

Under the hood a template is a single JSON document. The Edit JSON button at the very bottom of the right-hand panel opens it directly — the whole template when nothing is selected, or just the selected block. You can copy the text out, or edit it in place and Apply. Every change is checked before it applies, so an invalid edit can't break your template, and an applied change can be undone like any other edit.

You never need this to design a sign — the visual editor covers everything — but it's handy for copying a block's exact settings between templates or making a precise tweak by hand.

Working faster

Arrow keys nudge the selected block one grid cell; Shift + arrows resize it one cell.
Delete / Backspace removes the selected block.
Esc cancels a pending placement, then clears the selection.
Ctrl/Cmd + Z undoes; add Shift to redo.
Right-click a block or layer for its quick actions.

Apply a template to your signs

Custom templates appear under My templates in the same template picker you already use in the Signage Editor — open a sign's details, choose Change, and pick your template (or use the bulk Change template action to apply it across many signs at once).

Two things worth knowing:

Edits follow the template. If signs use your template and you edit it later, those signs update too. The editor header tells you how many signs currently use the template you're editing.
Deleting is safe. Deleting a template returns its signs to the built-in template they're based on — nothing else is affected.

Plans

Designing a template is open on every plan. Applying one to your signs is included in Club and higher plans.

On Free and Hobby you get one template slot — enough to design a template, preview it against a real course, and see exactly how it would look before deciding whether it's worth a plan. The new-template wizard says so upfront, so you never invest design effort expecting something you can't use.

Club includes 3 template slots and Pro plans 10 or more. The studio page always shows your slots ("2 / 3 used") and explains the upgrade path when you hit the limit.

Templates already in your library stay yours whatever your plan — you can always view, edit, and delete them. A downgrade never deletes a template; it only stops you applying one to a sign.