Shape the rail around your work
The tool rail is not a flat list. Rayzia has 52 tools and shows about 19 buttons: four core navigation tools (Select, Pan, Node, Zoom), twelve group slots, and three that stand alone (Live Paint, Connector, Artboard). Each group slot carries a small triangle. Click it and a flyout lists that group's members.
Here is the part people miss: your pick sticks. Choose Calligraphy from the pencil slot and Calligraphy is what that slot shows from then on, saved per slot in your browser. The rail you get on day one is only a set of defaults.
- shape: Rectangle, Ellipse, Star, Flare
- line: Line, Arc, Spiral, Rectangular Grid, Polar Grid
- pen: Pen, Add Anchor, Delete Anchor, Convert Anchor, Join
- pencil: Pencil, Smooth, Calligraphy, Blob Brush, Shaper
- text: Type, Area Type, Type on a Path, Vertical Type, Touch Type
- eraser: Eraser, Scissors, Knife
- transform: Rotate, Reflect, Scale, Shear, Free Transform
- width: Width, Tweak
- wand: Magic Wand, Lasso
- paint: Gradient, Mesh, Paint Bucket, Spray
- build: Shape Builder, Intertwine, Envelope, Blend
- probe: Dropper, Measure, Dimension, Perspective Grid
If you draw the same kind of work every day, spend two minutes setting all twelve slots before you start. It is the cheapest speed-up in the product, and it means you can stop hunting.
Learn the paint keys before anything else
Most people learn tool keys and never learn the paint keys, which is backwards. Tool keys save you a click. The paint keys save you a trip to a panel, over and over, all day.
| Keys | Does |
|---|---|
| X | Toggle which paint is active, fill or stroke |
| Shift + X | Swap fill and stroke |
| D | Default paint: white fill, black stroke |
| / | Set the active paint to none |
| , | Open the colour picker |
| . | Gradient |
The tool keys worth committing to muscle memory are the ones you reach for between every other action:
| Keys | Does |
|---|---|
| V | Select |
| P | Pen |
| N | Pencil |
| R | Rectangle |
| C | Ellipse |
| T | Text |
| Z | Zoom |
| F2 | Edit paths by nodes |
| F7 | Dropper |
| G | Gradient |
| Shift + D | Cycle Drawing Mode |
| Ctrl + Z / Ctrl + Y | Undo / Redo |
| Ctrl + A / Ctrl + Shift + A | Select all / Deselect |
| Arrow keys | Nudge the selection (hold Shift for ten times the distance) |
Ignore the keys printed inside the menu bar. They are labels, and the mechanism that would make them fire does not run. Two tooltips lie as well: Star advertises [*] and Width advertises [SHIFT+W], and neither key exists. Both are bugs we know about.
Stay non-destructive for as long as you can
Rayzia has three separate effect surfaces and they all sit on top of your geometry rather than replacing it. The Appearance panel stacks multiple fills, strokes and effects on one object. The Path Effects panel holds a live stack on a path, with per-effect parameters you can reopen, reorder or remove. The Effects panel lists what is currently applied to the selection.
The habit: reach for an effect before you reach for a boolean. If you round the corners with a live effect you can change your mind at 2am. If you rebuild the path by hand you cannot. When you genuinely need the baked geometry, Expand is there, and doing it last costs you nothing.
The same instinct applies to appearance you keep re-typing. Save it as a graphic style, and every object that wears it changes when the style does. Same for the Swatches panel: a global swatch means one edit recolours everything using it.
Let symbols and artboards do the repeating
If a thing appears more than twice, make it a symbol (Object ▸ Symbol ▸ Make Symbol). Instances are real SVG references, so redefining the symbol from a new selection updates every instance at once. That is the whole point. A window on a building, a bolt on a machine, an icon in a set: symbol it early, and the twentieth edit costs the same as the first.
Artboards handle the other kind of repetition. An artboard in Rayzia is a named crop frame on one infinite canvas, not a container. Objects float freely in the scene and a board simply declares that this rectangle is one page. That model is why variants are easy: put your logo down, draw a board around the light version and another around the dark one, and export.
- Draw the boards With the Artboard tool (Shift+O), drag on empty canvas for a new board, or pick a preset from its option bar: A4, Letter, IG Post, IG Story, YouTube, Full HD or Square.
- Or convert what you have The Artboards panel's menu has Convert Selection to Artboards, which puts one board around each selected object's bounding box. Plain rectangles you used as frames are consumed in the process, which is usually what you wanted.
- Tidy the layout Rearrange All Artboards lays every board out on a grid. Turn on Move Artwork with Artboard first if you want the contents to travel with them.
- Ship them Export All Artboards writes one SVG per board, named after the board. For raster or scaled output, use Export for Screens instead.
A single artboard sitting at the origin is not written into your SVG at all, so a one-page document stays a plain portable file. The board list only appears in the output once there are two or more, or one that has been moved.
Hand the AI the passes you resent
The AI Assistant is a dock tab with a prompt box. It connects to an account you already own: paste your own Anthropic, Gemini or OpenAI key into the gear popup, or connect a local Claude Code bridge with no key at all. The key lives in your browser. There is no proxy in the middle.
It is not a magic wand and it is poor at taste. It is very good at the passes you do not want to do: recolouring forty objects to a new palette, arranging a grid, renaming and tidying, applying the same effect down a list, generating a placeholder image. It can drive the tools, run engine commands and read the canvas back as an image to check its own work.
Two things make it safe to try. Each verb it runs is bracketed as exactly one undo step, labelled with the verb name, so a bad idea is one Ctrl+Z away. And when it groups work into a batch, the whole batch collapses to a single undo. Ask for the boring thing, look at it, undo if it is wrong. That loop costs seconds.
Freehand and pen strokes the AI draws are the exception: those replay through the real tool and land in history as the tool's own steps, so they are not guaranteed to be a single undo. Ask for shapes rather than strokes when you want a clean undo.
Common questions
Does Rayzia work offline?
Yes, for drawing. There is nothing to install and the editor runs in the page, with your document autosaved to the device. What needs a connection: cloud sync, share links, fonts you have not already loaded, and the AI, since that calls your provider's API. Draw on the plane, sync when you land.
I moved a tool into a slot and now I cannot find the old one.
Nothing was deleted. Click the small triangle on that slot to reopen the flyout and the whole group is still listed. If you want the original layout back, pick the default member again: Rectangle, Line, Pen, Pencil, Type, Eraser, Rotate, Width, Magic Wand, Gradient, Shape Builder and Dropper are the twelve defaults.
When should I not use a live effect?
When you need to hand the file to something that only understands plain geometry, or when you have finished deciding. Expand at the end of the job rather than the start. There is no performance reason to bake early on ordinary artwork, and baking early throws away the parameters you will want back.
Is my API key sent anywhere?
Not to us. The key sits in your browser's local storage and the provider is called straight from the page. There is no Rayzia backend in that path, which is also why we cannot see your prompts. The trade-off is that it is your key and your bill.