Z1 Canvas overview

Z1 Canvas is your design workspace for images, videos, emails, popups, and forms. Learn how the three tabs work and how designs hand off to Reach.

Z1 Canvas is your design workspace — the single place where you create everything visual in Zalify: images and videos, emails, and popups and forms. You design here; what you make then runs elsewhere in the platform, most often in Reach.

The three tabs

Z1 Canvas is organized into three tabs, one per type of work:

Images & Videos. Generate images and video clips with AI, edit and iterate on them, and save the results to your Assets library. See Generating images with AI and Generating videos with AI.
Emails. Design email templates and broadcasts in the drag-and-drop editor. The designs you build here are what Reach sends. See Designing emails in the editor.
Popups & Forms. Build signup forms, discount popups, contact forms, and surveys. See Creating a form or popup.

Design here, run in Reach

The most important thing to understand about Z1 Canvas is the split between designing and running:

You do this in Z1 Canvas	You do this in Reach
Design what an email looks like	Send it as a broadcast or automation, and read its reports
Design a form or popup	Connect it to a list, control when it appears, and review submissions
Generate and edit images and videos	Use them in campaigns via the Assets library

In other words: Z1 Canvas controls how things look, Reach controls what they do. When you can't find a setting in the Canvas editor — like which list a form feeds, or when a popup appears on your site — it almost certainly lives in Reach. Popup display rules, for example, are set on the Pixel Triggers page, not in the editor; see Controlling when your popup appears.

This split works in your favor: you can redesign an email or popup without touching its targeting, and change targeting without touching the design.

Two things that make Canvas work better

Brand Kit. Set up your logo, colors, fonts, and company address at /brand-kit before you start designing. Templates start from your Brand Kit, and AI generation uses it to keep output on-brand. See Brand Kit.
Assets library. Everything you generate or upload lives in one shared library, so an image you create in the Images & Videos tab is immediately available when you design an email or popup. See Assets library.

A typical workflow

Fill in your Brand Kit so designs and AI output start on-brand.
Generate or upload the visuals you need in Images & Videos, and save them to Assets.
Design your email in the Emails tab, or your signup form in Popups & Forms, pulling in assets from the library.
Switch to Reach to put the design to work — send the broadcast, connect the form to a list, or set the popup's display triggers.
Come back to Z1 Canvas whenever the design needs to change; republish, and Reach keeps running it with your existing settings.

Where to go next

If you're setting up Reach for the first time, the Reach setup checklist walks through the pieces in order, including the Canvas steps.

Generating images with AI