Artboard

Anyone designing something on a computer needs a surface on which the result takes shape. In many design programs, this exact surface is called an artboard. It has a fixed size, for example the dimensions of a phone screen or an A4 sheet. The crucial point: within a single file, many such surfaces often lie side by side on an endless background. So you’re not working on a single sheet of paper, but rather more like at a large table on which many sheets are spread out. Everything outside the surfaces is merely storage space and is not included in the final output.

Why designers need multiple surfaces side by side

An app rarely consists of a single screen. There’s a home screen, a search screen, a profile, an error message. If each of these screens gets its own artboard, you can see all the states at once. This immediately reveals, for instance, if a button is blue on one screen and green on another.

The second reason is different formats. An ad often needs a square version, a portrait one for mobile, and a wide one for desktop. In the past, three separate files were created for this. This regularly led to a correction ending up in only two of the three files. With artboards, everything lives in one document, and comparison is simply a matter of looking.

It’s important to distinguish this from a layer. A layer is a single element, such as a text or a photo, positioned above or below others. An artboard, by contrast, is the frame within which many such layers together form a finished image. Layers stack in depth, artboards sit side by side.

What happens when creating and exporting

When creating an artboard, you first specify the size, usually in pixels or millimeters. Many programs offer templates for this, such as 1080 by 1920 pixels for an Instagram Story. Afterward, you drag shapes, text, and images into this surface. Each element remembers which artboard it belongs to.

The practical benefit becomes clear during export, that is, when generating the final image files. The program cuts out each canvas individually and saves it as its own file, often named after the artboard. A document with twelve screens thus becomes twelve PNG files with a single click. Elements that extend beyond the edge are cropped off in the process.

A common misconception is assuming that artboards are simply pages. They are more independent: each surface can have a different size and a different aspect ratio. A single document may contain a poster, a business card format, and a phone screen all at once.

From Figma to the AI image generator

You’ll encounter this term in almost every professional design tool. Adobe Illustrator popularized it, and Figma and Sketch use it as well, sometimes under the name Frame there. Anyone who has seen the inside of an advertising agency or a product team will instantly recognize such files containing dozens of surfaces.

The concept becomes interesting through AI tools. Image generators and design assistants now fill multiple artboards at once, for example all the format variants of a campaign. The surface serves as a clear specification: it tells the software which aspect ratio and which crop is desired. That’s why the term regularly appears in company announcements from Adobe or Canva when it comes to automated format adaptation.

For students, this is especially relevant when creating presentations or posters. Once you’ve understood that the canvas determines the eventual crop, you avoid the most common beginner mistake: important parts of the design missing from the final image because they were located outside the frame.