Guidelines for Designing Paid Stencils
Paid stencil guidelines
Thinking about making a paid stencil? Read these guidelines first!
Make Something Awesome
Before starting to design your stencil, make sure that you've got something that other OmniGraffle users will buy. While it's hard to know what people want for sure, you can try asking other OmniGraffle users and fellow designers if they would pay for the stencil you wish to design. You can also email Graffletopia if you'd like some advice from us.
Group Objects Together
Your stencil should be easy to use. So, it's generally a good idea to group related items together so it's easier to grab parts of your stencil and drag them into a new OmniGraffle document. As an example, let's say you've created an arrow icon that's comprised of multiple shapes. When someone wants to use arrow, they need the entire arrow... not just a part of it. So, group the arrow items together. Then, if the user needs to ungroup them later, they can easily do that.
Use the 'Stencil View Mode' Toggle
There are two ways to view stencils. You can either view the entire stencil at once OR you can view the stencil broken into a grid of every shape group in the stencil. Make sure your stencil looks good in both views.
Remove Unused Objects
Sometimes when importing a stencil from other programs like Adobe Illustrator, your stencil may contain phantom shapes and objects. You can use OmniGraffle's outline browser to find and delete these from your stencil. You can also use 'Stencil View Mode' toggle to make sure there are no empty objects in the grid view.
General stencil guidelines
Once you begin designing your paid stencil, make sure you follow our existing guidelines for sharing stencils on Graffletopia.
Keep Your Stencil Simple
- If your stencil has multiple canvases (or pages), make sure to name each canvas.
- Avoid using colored backgrounds. Always use the default stencil background.
Prepare Your Stencil File
- Save your document as an OmniGraffle Stencil file. If your file is a regular OmniGraffle document, template, or diagram style, you will need to re-export it as a stencil file.
- Do not include additional files with your stencil file. If you have other things you'd like to share, just upload them to your own website and then add the link to your stencil's Website field.
- Upload one stencil at a time. If you have multiple stencils, do not try to upload them in a single zip file. Please upload them separately.
Compress Your Stencil
- Please compress your stencil as a zip archive before uploading. (And only use zip archives... we do not accept other compression formats.)
Describe Your Stencil
- Write a clear description that describes your stencil accurately.
- Do not add a credit block with your name, email, website, etc in your actual stencil file. Instead, enter this info into the fields that Graffletopia provides.
- Check all categories that apply to your stencil, but do not check every single category. That's not useful.
Have questions about designing a paid stencil? You can send us a message at .