The design tool

The design tool lets you create custom products by describing the pattern you want in words. The AI generates options, you place the design on the product, and you can preview it before anything is printed.

Designing your first custom product

Open the design tool. You'll need to be signed in to save your work.
Pick a base product — the actual physical thing your design will go on.
Choose a variant (size, color, or other options). Variants determine which print areas are available.
In AI mode, type a description of the pattern you want — see Writing AI prompts that work.
When the AI returns a pattern, adjust how it sits on each print area — see Adjusting design placement.
Refresh the preview to see what the finished product will look like.
Save the draft. From a saved draft you can list the product for sale.

Choosing a base product and variant

The base product is the physical item — for example, a specific style of shoe. The variant is a particular version of that product: a color, a size, or a combination of both.

Variants matter because they decide which print areas are available on the product. A high-top shoe will have different print areas than a low-top in the same line. If you switch variants partway through designing, the design tool will re-fit your pattern to the new product's print areas — but you may need to re-adjust placement.

Pick the variant first. Switching the base product later means redoing your placement work. Get the product and variant settled before you spend a lot of time on the pattern.

Writing AI prompts that work

The AI works best when you tell it what to make, not what to avoid. Some tips:

Describe the subject, then the style. "Mountain peaks at sunrise, watercolor style" works better than "watercolor, with maybe some mountains."
Be specific about color and mood. "Muted earth tones, soft" gives the AI more to work with than "nice colors."
Think about repetition. Designs that print onto a shoe or other product usually look best as patterns that tile or repeat naturally — call that out in the prompt if it's what you want.
Iterate. The first generation rarely lands. Tweak your prompt and regenerate.

Why my prompt was rejected

Every prompt is checked by an automated content moderation step before it's sent to the image generator. Prompts that look like they're asking for content that violates our Community Guidelines — sexual content, graphic violence, hate, content involving minors in unsafe contexts, or attempts to reproduce copyrighted characters or brands — are blocked.

The moderation isn't perfect. If a prompt was blocked that you believe is fine, try rephrasing it more concretely (describing what you do want, in plain language) or contact us at stepweave_admin@foxhillai.com with the prompt and the error.

Don't try to bypass moderation. Repeated attempts to evade the filter — or generating prohibited content despite warnings — are violations of our guidelines and can result in account action.

Adjusting design placement

Once you have a pattern, the placement editor shows where the design will sit on each print area of the product. Use it to:

Scale the pattern up or down within the print area
Shift it horizontally or vertically
See a live preview of how the placement will look on the finished product

Each print area is independent — adjusting the design on one part of a shoe doesn't change how it sits on another. Take a moment with each area; the defaults are reasonable but rarely perfect.

Previewing the final product

The design tool generates mockup previews showing your design rendered onto the product. These come from our fulfillment partner's mockup generator and update as you change the pattern or its placement.

Mockups are illustrations, not photographs. The actual manufactured product will be very close to the preview but not identical — see Mockup images vs. the final product for details on the small differences to expect.

Saving drafts vs. publishing

A draft is a design you're still working on. It's saved to your account and only visible to you. You can come back to a draft any time and keep editing.

A published product is a draft you've listed for sale on the marketplace. Once published, other users can see and buy it. You can unlist or edit a published product, but if it has active orders, those orders will continue with the version that was live when they were placed.

Manual mode

The design tool currently offers AI mode as the primary way to create patterns. Manual mode — uploading and arranging your own image files — is a placeholder right now and isn't fully wired up.

We'll update this article when manual upload is ready. In the meantime, AI mode is the supported path for creating designs.

Who owns AI-generated designs?

You own the rights to the designs you create on Step Weave, subject to a license that lets us display, manufacture, and ship them — see Section 6 of our Terms of Use for the full details.

That said, AI tools can produce output that resembles existing copyrighted work, characters, or brands. Even if the AI generated it, you're responsible for what you publish. Don't prompt the AI to copy a known character or brand and then try to sell the result — that's an IP violation regardless of how the image was made. See Community Guidelines §7.

If your design was substantially generated with AI, disclose that in the listing. Buyers deserve to know what they're purchasing.