Carousel Composer 2.0 — Presets with a point of view

Carousel Composer has a new visual system. We are calling this pass 2.0 because the preset selector now does something more useful than changing the surface of a slide: it changes the way the slide is composed.

A preset is no longer a skin

The first set of presets gave us a good starting point. Clear Signal, Soft Focus, Ink Column, Impact Field and Field Notes made it possible to move away from one default look, but some of the differences were still too close together. In a few cases, choosing another preset meant a different font, a new colour treatment or one more decoration around the same basic stack.

That is not enough for a creative tool. A real preset should feel like a different designer made the slide. It should change what the eye notices first, where the copy lives, how much air it gets and how an image participates in the frame.

The new system treats a preset as a composition grammar. It has a text anchor, a vertical bias, a reading width, a relationship between regions, a visual centre and a deliberate amount of asymmetry. Those rules give the renderer a point of view before it reaches for a colour or a border.

Ten ways to see the same story

Carousel Composer now ships ten directions: Clear Signal, Soft Focus, Ink Column, Impact Field, Field Notes, Handwritten, Offset Print, Corner Brackets, Label Frame and Gallery Note. They cover the clean grid, the editorial column, the poster, the scrapbook, the handwritten lifestyle page, the printed zine, the technical specimen and the quiet photo essay.

The names are not just labels for a gallery. Each direction has its own relationship between eyebrow, headline, body, image and whitespace. Handwritten can feel scattered and personal. Offset Print can let the image cross the text with a physical registration shift. Gallery Note can leave the slide deliberately quiet and centred. Clear Signal stays precise so the system still has a reliable control sample.

Images get their own small grammar too. A preset can call for a floating object, a pinned photo, a cropped column, a bleed or a print frame, while the selected image layout still belongs to the slide. Gestures are deterministic, so a circle, rule or registration mark remains stable between preview and export instead of changing every time the slide is drawn.

The controls stay separate

This separation matters more than the number of presets. Palette is one axis. Preset is another. Copy, image layout and image shape remain creator controls. Switching from Brand to Mono should change the colour roles; switching from Clear Signal to Handwritten should change the composition. Neither action should erase the wording or quietly rewrite the image decisions you already made.

That makes experimentation cheaper. You can keep the same story, preview ten different editorial directions and decide whether the idea wants a poster, a column or more breathing room. If one slide needs a different image treatment, you can still shape that slide without losing the broader visual language of the carousel.

One renderer, every surface

The preset data lives in the shared Carousel Composer contract and the same canonical renderer draws the result in the public Composer, the PoeysiaPRO web workspace and the desktop app. Five palettes and ten presets produce the complete visual matrix, while the inspector can preview a style before you commit to it.

That shared foundation is important because a preset is only useful if the result survives the whole workflow. The slide you compare in the inspector should be the slide you review on the canvas, see in the phone preview and export as a PNG.

A better first draft, not a final answer

Carousel Composer still starts with the same promise: give it a website, a topic, a blog post or your own text and get a structured first draft. The new preset system gives that draft more ways to become yours without turning the editor into a design software course.

The machine can choose a direction. You decide whether it is the right one, edit the words, move through the slides and export the set when the story is ready. That is the part we want to keep improving: more useful starting points, with the editorial decision still in your hands.

Carousel Composer 2.0 is a step toward that kind of tool. Less skin-deep variation, more composition, and a faster path from the same source material to something that feels intentionally made.