Import a design (Figma, Penpot, Illustrator, InDesign)
Bring a finished design out of Figma, Penpot, Illustrator or InDesign and into Lolly - not as a frozen picture, but as a live, editable layout you can keep working on, mix with tools, and render through Lolly's deterministic export path. Like everything else, the whole import happens on your device: the file is parsed in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
The good news for everything you've already made: none of it is stranded in the app you drew it in. A design you spent hours on in another tool arrives as an editable session, already conformed to your design globals - and once you save it, it's a reusable template anyone with Lolly can open and refill.
Import lives in Layout Studio, Lolly's free canvas: open it, click Import a design in the canvas toolbar, and choose a file. The artboard resizes to the file's frame and every layer becomes an editable box on the same open canvas - so an imported artboard is just an ordinary Layout Studio session from the first click.
What you can import
Several file kinds go in - a native Figma binary, a Penpot export, an Illustrator or PDF file, an InDesign markup file, or any SVG. That last one is the wide door: SVG is a universal export (or native save) format, so almost any design app can reach Lolly through it.
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
.fig | A native Figma file (File → Save local copy). Decoded entirely in the browser - no Figma account, plugin, or API key involved. |
.penpot / .zip | A Penpot export (its standard export bundle). |
.ai / .pdf | An Illustrator file (saved with the default PDF-compatible option) or any PDF. Vector paint, text and images are read straight out of the page. |
.idml | An InDesign layout (File → Export → InDesign Markup). A raw .indd can't be read directly - export IDML first. |
.svg | Any SVG - Figma and Penpot SVG exports, or hand-written markup. Tip: for editable text from a Figma SVG, untick "Outline text" on Figma's export dialog. |
Bringing a PowerPoint deck instead? Decks have their own doors - edit in Deck Builder, rebrand in place, or file slides as assets. See Decks and documents below.
Where each app fits
- Figma - File → Save local copy for a native
.fig, or export a frame as SVG. (Untick Outline text on the SVG export to keep headlines retypable.) - Penpot - its standard
.penpotexport, or any SVG export. Penpot is also where the brand tokens round-trip both ways - see below. - Illustrator - a native
.ai(kept PDF-compatible, the default) or a.pdfopens directly; no SVG step needed. - InDesign - File → Export → InDesign Markup for an
.idml. A print layout becomes an editable, brand-conformed Lolly session. (A raw.inddisn't readable - export IDML.)
What happens to the layers
The importer maps design layers onto the free canvas's box model, keeping as much editable as it can:
- Text stays text. Frames of type become real text boxes - content, size, alignment, weight, line-height, and per-run colours carry over - so you can retype a headline, not repaint it.
- Shapes stay shapes. Rectangles, rounded rects, ellipses and pills become native shape boxes with their fills, opacity, rotation and corner radii.
- Images are extracted. Bitmaps land in My images (your on-device library) and are placed as image boxes.
- Complex vector art is flattened faithfully. Paths, gradients and other paint Lolly's box model can't express are baked into crisp standalone SVG image boxes, so the visual result survives even where editability can't.
- Geometry is exact. Positions, sizes and rotations are resolved by the browser itself (the same maths that rendered the original), so the imported layout lines up with the source.
It conforms to the brand
This is the point of importing rather than pasting a screenshot: the result is a governed layout, not a foreign artboard.
- Type remaps to the brand faces. Every imported font becomes one of the faces your brand pack ships (monospace families map to your brand's mono face, weights clamp to the cuts that exist). That's intended behaviour - the design arrives already on-brand.
- Colours are guarded. Every imported fill passes the same colour sanitiser native boxes use; from there you can snap them to brand swatches with the normal pickers.
- Everything else is a normal session. Drag, rotate, snap, group, clip; place themable icons and library assets; save it, share it as a URL, run it through Batch.
Rendering
An imported design exports exactly like a native one: SVG, PDF, PNG, JPG, WebP through the same deterministic pipeline - true page sizes and physical units, outlined type in vector output, Content Credentials on every stampable format. The design's new home is its URL, so a once-off Figma file becomes a reproducible, parameter-addressable asset.
From a one-off design to a reusable template
This is where import stops being a conversion and starts being authoring. An imported layout is an ordinary Layout Studio session, so it inherits everything a native session can do:
- It's a template anyone can reuse. Save it and the layout lives at a URL. Anyone with Lolly can open that URL, change the words, swap an image, and render their own version - no design app, no design skill, and the parts the author locked stay locked. The person who imported the artboard becomes its author; everyone else just fills in the blanks.
- It mixes with tools. Any box can hold another Lolly tool as a live asset - a badge that renders its own QR code, a card with a live chart, another render dropped in through the asset picker. Those stay live and re-render on load; they're never flattened pictures. So an imported poster can carry generated, always-current content the original file never could.
- It scales like any session. Drive it from the batch grid (one finished asset per spreadsheet row), keep it in a Projects folder, or render a whole folder as one zip. A single imported design turns into a whole run of consistent variants.
For a fully declarative tool - sidebar inputs, hard-coded constraints, the works - you'd still author a tool.json by hand (see Authoring Tools). Import gets you the fast, visual 90%: a governed, shareable, tool-embedding layout without writing a manifest.
Round-tripping the brand itself
Import travels one direction; the brand primitives travel both ways. Lolly's colours are DTCG design tokens - the same format Penpot imports/exports natively and Tokens Studio brings to Figma - so the palette you design with in Figma/Penpot and the palette Lolly enforces are one document, not two hand-synced lists.
Limits & safety
- Imported SVG is treated as untrusted: scripts, event handlers and foreign objects are stripped before parsing, and anything flattened to disk is sanitised a second time on ingest. Nothing executes, nothing leaves the device.
- Very large files are capped at 2,000 elements - anything past that is dropped with a warning rather than locking the tab.
- Effects outside the box model (complex blend stacks, exotic strokes) flatten into the image fallback rather than round-tripping as editable properties.
Every format Lolly can read
Design files are one way in - the table above covers them. For the complete picture, here is everything Lolly ingests. As with a design import, every file is parsed on your device and nothing is uploaded.
Images
Drop a photo or graphic into any image picker or your My images library.
| Format | Notes |
|---|---|
png · jpg/jpeg · webp | Decoded natively; stills are downscaled and stripped of EXIF/GPS on ingest, then kept in My images. |
gif · apng · animated webp | Animated rasters are recognised and stored verbatim - frames intact - so they stay animated when placed. |
avif | Read wherever your browser decodes it natively (no bundled fallback). |
heic / heif (.heic, .hif) | iPhone photos decode even where the browser can't, via a bundled libheif fallback. |
svg | Sanitised (scripts, on* handlers and javascript: URLs removed) and normalised to a clean viewBox. |
Decks and documents
| Format | Notes |
|---|---|
pptx (PowerPoint) | Three ways in, all on-device. Deck Builder's Load panel opens a deck as editable slides - text, shapes, images, tables and speaker notes become freeform objects, with colours snapped to your brand - ready to re-export as PPTX, PDF or video. The Rebrand a Deck utility re-themes a deck without re-authoring it: the theme palette, hardcoded colours and fonts swap to your brand while charts, SmartArt and animations pass through untouched, and you get a .pptx back. And dropping a .pptx on any upload area asks which slides to keep - each is stored as an SVG asset in your library. |
pdf / .ai | Besides the Layout Studio import above, dropping a PDF on an upload area asks which pages to keep - each page becomes a self-contained SVG asset (vector paint, text and images preserved). |
Data
Paste or drop a table and a tool's repeating blocks fill from it (up to 1,000 rows).
| Format | Notes |
|---|---|
csv | RFC 4180 - quoted fields, "" escaping, embedded commas/newlines, CRLF/LF, BOM. |
json | An array of row objects, headerless positional arrays, or a { "data": [...] } / { "rows": [...] } wrapper. |
Lottie (.json, .lottie) | Bodymovin JSON and dotLottie animations validate and place as live vector animations. |
Video
| Format | Notes |
|---|---|
mp4 · mov | ISO-BMFF containers, stored verbatim (never transcoded); dimensions probed locally. |
webm | Matroska/EBML, stored verbatim. |
Audio
Audio lands in the asset picker - ready as a music bed under a video export, or in Neurospicy Mode's ambient player.
| Format | Notes |
|---|---|
mp3 · wav · ogg/Opus · m4a/AAC · flac | Kept byte-for-byte and decoded on-device. |
midi (.mid) | Converted on import to a tiny on-device synth track. |
Tracker modules (mod · xm · it · s3m · stm · mtm) | A few kilobytes of song data, decoded on-device by a bundled player. |
Content Credentials (verify)
Lolly reads and cryptographically verifies a signed C2PA manifest embedded in PDF, PNG/APNG, JPG, GIF, SVG, TIFF, WebP, MP4 and WebM/MKV - entirely on-device, against the signing certificate. The /verify view goes further: it flags AI-generated content, detects Lolly's own pixel Imprint, verifies SEAL signatures, optionally deep-scans for third-party pixel watermarks, and surfaces hidden data - none of it uploaded. See Content Credentials and Content Credentials Identity. (HEIC and AVIF are read as images but carry no credential.)
Metadata (to strip it)
The Strip Hidden Data utility reads embedded metadata so it can remove it - EXIF/GPS/IPTC/XMP from JPEG, text and time chunks from PNG, comments and editor namespaces from SVG, and document info from PDF. The cleaned file never leaves your device.