Shape and Clipart Library for Your Product Designer

Applies to Cmsmart Product Designer (NBDesigner) 2.17.0 · Updated October 2026. Screens below are from the live nbdesigner.cmsmart.net demo, so your own wp-admin and product pages will match if you run Cmsmart Product Designer on WooCommerce.

In short

  • Cmsmart Product Designer ships with a built-in shape and clipart library, so buyers decorate their own products and your team stops redrawing the same icons for every order.
  • Shapes, icons and photos live in the designer's Cliparts, Elements and Photos panels next to Templates and Text, and whatever a buyer drops on the canvas becomes part of the print-ready PDF Cmsmart renders at checkout.
  • Turning it on is a WooCommerce admin job: enable the global library, choose which categories each product can use, add your own branded shapes, and the panel is ready — no design software required.

Why is manual redrawing still your biggest hidden design cost?

Without a shared shape library, every custom order forces someone — the buyer or your staff — to recreate logos, icons and borders from scratch. Cmsmart's clipart library removes that manual step: buyers reuse the same vetted shapes your store provides, design time drops, and every print-ready file matches your brand standard.

The market rewards getting this right. The global print-on-demand and custom-product segment is projected to reach $13.1 billion in 2026, growing at roughly 23.6% a year (Grand View Research, 2026) — more stores chasing the same buyers makes a fast, consistent design experience a real differentiator, not a nice-to-have.

Open a custom product designer with no element library and you can predict what happens next. Buyers with no design skill either abandon the order or grab a random "free" icon from a search engine — one that is blurry, the wrong color mode, or someone else's intellectual property by the time it reaches your print queue. Multiply that across every SKU in your catalog and four costs stack up fast:

  • Staff time. Someone on your team keeps recreating the same ribbons, borders and seasonal icons by hand for each new product or variant instead of reusing a shape once.
  • Reprints. A low-resolution or wrong-color-mode graphic a buyer pasted in looks fine on screen and prints muddy, so the order comes back as a refund or a reprint.
  • Abandoned designs. An empty canvas with nothing to start from — no shapes, no templates — reads as "too much work," and the buyer leaves before finishing checkout.
  • Brand drift. Across dozens of design-enabled products, every buyer's ad-hoc clipart choice pulls your catalog further from a consistent look.

What would it look like if every design started on-brand?

Picture a holiday rush where fifty buyers design fifty different invitations in one afternoon. Cmsmart's shape library means every one of them pulls from the same vetted icon set, so ribbons, borders and seasonal graphics match your brand guide automatically — without you reviewing a single design by hand before it ships to production.

Example scenario. A stationery store turns on three clipart categories for its Invitation product: borders, seasonal icons and monogram frames. A buyer opens the designer, picks a template, drags in a border and a heart icon from Cliparts, types in their own names and date, and clicks Process. The saved design shows as "Your artwork" next to Add to cart — no email back-and-forth, and no one on staff has to check the clipart before the order reaches the print queue.

WooCommerce product page for a custom invitation with a Start and upload design button
The buyer's starting point: a design-enabled WooCommerce product page on the live Cmsmart demo.

How does Cmsmart's shape and clipart library fit into the designer?

Cmsmart Product Designer puts Cliparts and Elements panels next to Templates, Text, Photos and Layers inside the same browser-based editor your buyers already use. Pick a category, drag a shape onto the canvas, resize it like any other layer, and it flows straight through to the print-ready PDF Cmsmart renders at checkout — no extra plugin, no separate app.

How would you like to design dialog: upload a full design or design here online
The design chooser: a buyer can upload a finished file or open the online designer to use the shape and template library instead.
Cmsmart Product Designer's shape and clipart library panel inside the online designer, next to Templates and Text tabs
The online designer's sidebar: Templates, Text, Cliparts, Photos, Elements and Layers all sit one click apart.

The shape library is one panel inside a bigger pipeline. From a buyer's first click to a print-ready file, five building blocks do the work:

  1. Storefront entry point — a "Start and upload design" button on the product page; built into the plugin.
  2. Design chooser — upload a finished file, start from a template, or design online; built in.
  3. Online designer — Templates, Text, Cliparts, Photos, Elements and Layers on one canvas; built in. The global clipart library and your own uploaded shapes both live in the Cliparts panel; the global library alone spans dozens of categories, loaded one category page at a time so adding more never slows the panel down.
  4. Pricing and print options — the price matrix and printing-option rules that react to size, material or quantity; built in, configured under Printing Options.
  5. Print-ready output — Cmsmart's cloud renderer turns the finished canvas, shapes included, into the same PDF your order screen's Create PDF button would generate; built in.

Cmsmart insight: most "wrong color" complaints we see on print jobs trace back to a clipart layer dropped in as a web-optimized PNG, not a shape from the plugin's own library. Keep the global library as the default source, and restrict uploads to your own tested files if color accuracy matters more to you than sheer variety.

StepManual workflowCmsmart Product Designer
Finding a shape or iconBuyer searches the web, or emails your team a reference imageBuyer opens the Cliparts panel and picks from the store's own library
Color and resolutionUnknown — often RGB, low-DPI web graphicsShapes sized for the canvas and exported through the same CMYK-ready pipeline as the rest of the design
Brand consistencyDepends on whatever the buyer happens to findEvery buyer draws from the categories you configured
Getting to a print fileDesign, email, manual check, re-exportProcess → Cmsmart Cloud renders the print-ready PDF automatically

What's the business value of a built-in shape library?

A shared shape library turns design consistency into something you configure once instead of policing order by order. Cmsmart stores see fewer reprint-triggering mistakes, faster checkouts because buyers are not hunting for graphics elsewhere, and a catalog that reads as one brand across every design-enabled product.

BenefitHow it shows up in your businessKPI to track
Fewer reprintsBuyers use vetted, print-ready shapes instead of random web imagesReprint rate per 100 orders
Faster checkoutBuyers finish a design in the browser instead of leaving to find graphics elsewhereDesign-to-cart completion rate
Less design laborYour team stops redrawing the same shapes for every new order or product lineStaff hours on manual artwork per month
Consistent brandEvery buyer pulls from the same category set you configured onceProducts using approved clipart categories vs. total design-enabled products

Rough the math for your own store: multiply your custom orders per month by the minutes your team currently spends manually sourcing or redrawing a shape per order, then by your loaded hourly design rate. That total is the monthly labor cost the Cliparts panel removes once buyers source their own shapes from the library instead. Plug in your own order volume, minutes per order and hourly rate to see where you land.

Keeping that look consistent is worth more than the hours it saves. A 2019 survey of more than 200 brand teams found that consistent branding across channels was tied to as much as a 33% revenue lift (PR Newswire / Lucidpress "State of Brand Consistency," 2019). A shape library is one of the cheapest ways to keep that consistency automatic instead of manual, order after order.

Cmsmart Product manager screen listing 34 design-enabled WooCommerce products
Product manager: once the library is configured, it scales across every design-enabled product in the catalog — 34 on this demo store.

How do you set up the shape and clipart library in Cmsmart Product Designer?

Turning on the shape library is a WooCommerce admin job, not a design project. You enable the global library, decide which categories each product can show, optionally add your own branded shapes, and the Cliparts panel is ready for buyers on every design-enabled product — no code and no separate design software.

  1. In wp-admin, go to Cmsmart → Settings → General and confirm Enable global clipart library is turned on (it ships on by default).
  2. Open Cmsmart → Media → Cliparts to see the categories every product can draw from, and upload your own branded shapes — logos, ribbons, borders — into their own category.
  3. Already uploaded a shape into the wrong category? Use the category picker on its card to move it instead of deleting and re-uploading.
  4. On a design-enabled product, open Product manager, edit the product, and under its Clipart settings choose Include Cmsmart global clipart library or restrict it to selected categories only.
  5. Want more variety than your own uploads cover? Add a Flaticon API key on the General settings tab so buyers can search a much larger icon catalog from the same Cliparts panel.
  6. Open the product on the storefront, click Start and upload design → Design here online, and confirm the Cliparts and Elements tabs show the categories you just configured.
  7. Drag a shape onto the canvas, resize and recolor it like any other layer, then click Process to save the design as "Your artwork" next to Add to cart.
  8. Place a test order, open Cmsmart → Orders, then the order's Create PDF tab, and confirm the shape renders correctly in the print-ready PDF before you rely on it for real orders.

Cmsmart insight: clipart and background management picked up real reliability work in 2.16 — deleting a background now removes its whole card instead of leaving an orphaned thumbnail, and category pickers stay pointed at the right item afterward. If your admin's clipart library has gotten untidy over the years, a current Cmsmart install is worth revisiting before you build a bigger shape set on top of it.

Saved product design shown as Your artwork next to the Add to cart button
Process saves the buyer's design, shapes included, as "Your artwork" — ready for Add to cart.
Cmsmart order screen showing a print-ready PDF rendered by the cloud renderer
The same design, shapes and all, as the print-ready PDF Cmsmart's cloud renderer generates on the order.

For the settings behind printing options and price matrices that react to size or material, see our guide to configuring printing options and price matrix rather than reconfiguring them here. If you also want buyers to add their own freehand artwork alongside library shapes, our tutorial on the drawing tool covers that companion workflow. Template collections that bundle shapes, text and layout together are configured separately — see how to build and assign a template.

Going further: what can Cmsmart build on top of the shape library?

The Cliparts panel covers shapes, icons and your own uploads out of the box. When a store needs more — a locked brand kit per wholesale account, shape-aware AI preflight, or a connector that pulls approved artwork straight from your brand portal — Cmsmart builds that as custom development on top of the same designer, not a separate product.

  • Brand-kit locking. Restrict a wholesale account or franchise location to only its own approved shapes and colors, so nobody designs off-brand even by accident. Custom development.
  • Shape-aware AI preflight. Cmsmart's AI preflight already flags low-resolution layers before checkout; we extend it to warn specifically when an uploaded, non-library shape falls below your print DPI threshold. Built on the existing AI preflight, tuned as custom development.
  • ERP or brand-portal-linked libraries. Pull your product line's approved icon set automatically from your PIM or brand portal instead of re-uploading it into Cmsmart by hand. Custom development.
  • Bulk shape placement for gang sheets. Apply the same seasonal badge or logo across a batch of designs in one pass for high-volume print-on-demand runs, building on the batch and gang-sheet work we do for B2B web-to-print stores. Custom development.
Video thumbnail: managing the WooCommerce Online Designer clipart library in wp-admin
Video: How to manage the WooCommerce Online Designer clipart library in the backend (Cmsmart on YouTube).

Plan a branded shape library for my store

Every custom build like this follows the same path: a short discovery call, a solution design we review with you, development in sprints, QA against your real catalog, launch, and ongoing support — the same process behind the case studies on our ecommerce projects page.

Why work with Cmsmart on your product designer?

Cmsmart has built web-to-print and product-customization storefronts since 2012 as part of Netbase JSC, with 6,300+ client projects delivered across 80+ countries and 1,800+ live stores running today. The same team that ships the Cliparts panel in the plugin also builds the custom shape, pricing and approval workflows stores need beyond it.

Cmsmart holds a 4.2-out-of-5 rating on Trustpilot across 404 reviews. Store owners call out the depth of the designer specifically: "The tool has so many options. We are very happy with it. Also the support team is very fast... We would recommend the NB Designer tool for printing personalized cards," wrote M. Idema, a Trustpilot reviewer from the Netherlands.

For the plugin itself, see the Cmsmart Product Designer (NBDesigner) product page, and for the wider storefront, pricing and production workflow it plugs into, our web-to-print solutions hub. If your shape library needs go beyond what the plugin covers today, our product designer customization service is where that work gets scoped.

Frequently asked questions

Does the shape library work on every product, or do I configure it per product?

It is available to any product with the online designer enabled. You can leave the global clipart library on for every product, or restrict individual products to specific categories from that product's Clipart settings in Product manager.

Can buyers upload their own shapes instead of using the library?

Yes. Upload design lets a buyer bring a finished file, and inside the online designer the Photos panel accepts their own images alongside the library's shapes. Settings → Upload design controls which file types and minimum DPI you accept.

Does a shape stay print-ready once it is on the canvas?

Yes. Whatever a buyer places — a library shape or their own upload — is part of the same design Cmsmart renders into the print-ready PDF on Process, matching the file your order screen's Create PDF button would generate.

Can we add more shapes than the built-in library has?

Add your own branded shapes in Media → Cliparts, or connect a Flaticon API key on Settings → General so buyers can search Flaticon's larger icon catalog from the same panel.

Will adding more clipart categories slow down the designer?

No. Each category loads its own page of cliparts on demand instead of pulling the whole library at once, so adding categories does not bloat the editor's initial load.

What if we need rules the plugin does not have, like locking a franchise to approved artwork only?

That is custom development. Cmsmart builds category and account-level restrictions, approval routing and connected brand portals on top of the existing Cliparts panel — see the Going further section above.