FunFactory documentation
FunFactory makes a sheet of shapes, buttons, badges and stickers. Every item is one of twelve shapes carrying words, a picture, or both — and every styling choice can belong to the whole sheet or to one item alone. When it looks right, export one item, each item as its own file, or the entire sheet packed onto a page with cut lines that trace each shape. This page walks through how it all works.
Installation
FunFactory is available two ways.
- The App Store, for Mac, iPhone and iPad — one purchase covers all three, and it installs and updates the usual way.
- The direct download for Mac, from bendansby.com/apps/funfactory. It's a
.dmg: open it and drag FunFactory.app to your Applications folder. This build is a free trial and keeps itself up to date — see License and updates.
Both builds are the same app with the same features. The difference is only in how you buy and update them.
Sheets and items
A FunFactory document is a sheet, and a sheet holds items. Each item is one shape with its own words and picture, drawn on its own tile in the editing grid. There's no free canvas to drag items around on — the grid is the working surface, and the arrangement onto a page happens at export time, where it can be packed properly.
A new sheet starts with a single item to style. If you'd rather see the range of what FunFactory does first, File ▸ New Sample Sheet (⇧⌘N) opens a fully built sheet to poke at.
Adding items
- Add Item (⇧⌘A) puts a fresh item on the sheet.
- Drop images onto the sheet and you get one item per image.
- Drop an image straight onto an item to set just that item's picture, leaving everything else alone.
- Paste (⌘V) items copied from another sheet. If the clipboard holds an image instead, it goes into the selected item — or becomes a new item when nothing is selected. Mac
- Duplicate Item (⌘D) and Delete Item (⌘⌫) do what they say.
Select several items at once to duplicate, delete, copy or reorder them together, and drag items to reorder the sheet. Reading order is the order they'll be packed in when you export.
The twelve shapes
Rectangle, ellipse, triangle, diamond, hexagon, star, burst, shield, bubble, heart, tag and arrow.
There's no separate square or pill shape, because there doesn't need to be one — both are the rectangle at a different Corners radius. Set it to zero for a hard-cornered rectangle, run it all the way up for a pill.
All items vs. this item
This is the idea FunFactory is built around, so it's worth understanding first.
Every card in the inspector carries a switch reading All items or This item. It decides who that one property belongs to:
- All items — the property is shared by the whole sheet. Change the fill once and every item changes.
- This item — the property belongs to the selected item alone, and the rest of the sheet ignores it.
The switch is per property, not per item, which is the whole point: a sheet can share one shape, one border and one shadow while every item keeps its own size and its own caption. Or the reverse. There are also Share All Properties and Unshare All Properties if you want to start from one extreme.
When a property is shared and several items are selected, a card that would disagree across them shows Mixed rather than pretending one value is the truth.
Every style property
| Property | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Shape | Which of the twelve shapes the item is. |
| Size | Width and height of the item itself, in points. |
| Corners | Corner radius. Only appears for shapes that have corners to round. |
| Padding | Breathing room between the shape's edge and its contents. |
| Fill | None, a solid color, or a gradient between two colors at any angle. |
| Border | An outline, with its own color and line width. |
| Effect | A drop shadow or a glow, with offset, spread and strength. |
| Surface | Flat, Bevel (with its own strength, hardness and depth), or Glass — the treatment that raises a shape into a button. Either can sit under a shadow. |
| Text | The words in the item. |
| Font | Sans Serif, Serif, Mono or Rounded, at Regular, Semibold, Bold or Heavy. |
| Text Color | The color of those words. |
| Image | The picture: an SF Symbol, an emoji, or your own file. |
| Layout | Where the picture sits relative to the text — above, below, left or right. |
Everything scales with the item, so the same design reads correctly whether it comes out as a small sticker or a wide card.
Text
Type into the Text card and the item redraws as you go. If the words don't fit the space the shape leaves them, the text shrinks to fit rather than spilling over the edge or getting clipped — so a long caption on a small badge still comes out looking deliberate.
Pictures
An item's picture can come from three places:
- Symbol — any SF Symbol, with a search field to find one.
- Emoji — typed straight in.
- Custom — your own image file, chosen from a picker or dropped onto the item.
Pictures aspect-fit inside the shape; nothing is cover-cropped, so a logo or a glyph is never trimmed to fill a box. Use Layout to put the picture above, below, left or right of the words, or leave the text empty for a picture on its own.
A custom image is copied into the document when you add it, so the sheet stays self-contained — move the .funsheet to another Mac and the pictures travel with it.
Presets
Presets are looks, not templates. Eight ship with the app — Sticker, Glass Button, Price Burst, Award, Neon, Price Tag, Chip and Plain Label — each previewed as artwork rather than named in a list, so you can judge it by looking.
Three things worth knowing about applying one:
- A preset sets everything except the text and the picture. It restyles what you have; it doesn't overwrite what it says.
- It respects your shared-or-individual split: shared properties go to the whole sheet, individual ones to the selected item.
- It lands as a single undo, so one ⌘Z takes the whole look back off.
Save Current… adds the selected item's styling to your own preset library, which lives with the app rather than inside the document — so your presets follow you from sheet to sheet. Remove one you don't want, and Restore Defaults brings the eight built-ins back.
One item, or each item
| Command | What you get |
|---|---|
| Export This Item… ⌘E | The selected item as a single PNG with a transparent background. |
| Export Each Item… ⇧⌘E | A folder you choose, with one PNG per item on the sheet. |
| Export Sheet… ⌥⌘E | Every item packed onto a page — see below. |
Exports render through the same drawing code as the tiles you've been looking at, so what comes out matches the preview.
The whole sheet
A sheet export goes through Sheet Setup (⌘K), which is both the settings dialog and the live preview of the page you're about to produce. Set the page up, watch the preview, then export from there — as a PNG or as a PDF.
Copies is per item: set an item to four copies and it lands four times on the exported sheet. It only affects the sheet export — exporting items separately always writes one file per item.
Page and packing
| Setting | Options |
|---|---|
| Page | US Letter, A4, Custom (any width and height in inches), or Tight — no page at all, just a sheet exactly as big as the packed items need. |
| Packing | Shelf packing by default, which fits items in as tightly as it can. Even grid instead lays every item out in equal cells — looser, but the columns line up, which is what you want if the sheet is going to be cut. |
| Margin | The border left clear around the edge of the page. |
| Gap | The gutter between items. |
| Item scale | Scales every item as it's placed, without touching the items' own sizes — the knob for "same design, smaller stickers". |
| Background | A solid color, or Transparent. |
If the items can't fit the page at full size, FunFactory scales them down to make them fit and tells you what percentage it used, rather than cropping them or failing.
Cut lines
If you're going to cut the sheet up, have FunFactory print the guides.
| Style | What it draws |
|---|---|
| None | No guides. |
| Trace Shape | A line following each item's own outline — around the points of a star, around the curve of a heart. For a die cutter, or for cutting by hand. |
| Box | A plain rectangle around each item's bounding box. |
| Crop Marks | Corner marks only — the trim guide a print shop expects. |
Cut lines have their own color and line width, plus a Bleed setting that pushes the line out from the shape so the print doesn't end flush with the blade.
Resolution
Sheet exports are written at 300 dpi by default, which is the right choice for print. 144 is plenty for a sheet that's only going to be looked at on a screen. PDF is resolution-independent apart from any pictures inside items.
There's an upper limit of 16,384 pixels per side — far past any real sheet, but reachable with a deliberately enormous item and a wide glow. If an export would cross it, FunFactory reduces the resolution to stay within it and says so, rather than silently producing a file nothing can open.
Documents and undo
Sheets are saved as .funsheet documents holding your items, their styling and any pictures you added. Everything is undoable, so experimenting costs nothing — including applying a preset, which undoes as one step rather than a dozen.
Your presets and preferences live with the app rather than in the document, which is why a preset you save on one sheet is there on the next.
On iPhone and iPad
It's the same app, adapted to the screen rather than cut down.
- iPad puts the inspector beside the sheet, the way the Mac does.
- iPhone gives the sheet the whole screen and slides the inspector up as a panel. It sits at half height by default with the canvas still live behind it, so you can watch an item change while you drag a slider. Drag the handle to take it full height when you want more room.
- Controls that are a cramped grid in a sidebar — the shape picker, the symbol browser, the preset library — open as full screens instead, with targets a finger can actually hit and a real search field.
- Exports hand off to the share sheet, so a finished sticker can go straight to Messages, Files, Photos or anywhere else.
- Sheets open and save through the system document browser, so they can live in iCloud Drive or wherever else you keep files.
Keyboard shortcuts Mac
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| ⇧⌘A | Add Item |
| ⌘D | Duplicate Item |
| ⌘⌫ | Delete Item |
| ⌘K | Sheet Setup |
| ⌘E | Export This Item… |
| ⇧⌘E | Export Each Item… |
| ⌥⌘E | Export Sheet… |
| ⇧⌘N | New Sample Sheet |
| ⌘V | Paste a copied item, or an image |
| ⌘Z | Undo |
License and updates
The App Store build has no license keys to deal with — Apple handles the purchase, and updates arrive the usual way.
The direct download is a free trial. Once you've used it for a while, an occasional reminder appears after an export; a license key removes it for good. Enter or buy one from the FunFactory menu (Enter License… and Buy License…). That build also checks for its own updates and can be prodded manually with FunFactory ▸ Check for Updates….
Privacy
FunFactory collects and transmits nothing. No analytics, no telemetry, no accounts. Shapes, text, effects, the packed sheet and the cut lines are all drawn on your own device, and the sheets you build and the files you export never leave it. The App Store build makes no network connections of its own at all; the direct-download Mac build makes exactly one, to check for updates.
For the full details, see the privacy policy.
Support
Questions, bug reports, or feature requests? Email ben.dansby@gmail.com and you'll get a reply, usually within a day or two.