Yo Design Geeks! Check Out These New Thrive Architect Layout & Position Features

Noticed anything different about Thrive Architect lately?

That’s right, we recently updated its Layout & Position interface to give you more options and functionality when creating content for your Thrive Themes powered sites.

Want to get the full scoop on what’s changed and how it will help you to ship better content faster?

Watch the video above and read the post below to get a tutorial on all the latest Thrive Architect interface updates.

Instead of having just a single slider option to set an element’s Maximum Width (which is what Thrive Architect had before), it now gives you the ability to set Fixed, Minimum and Maximum Widths and Heights.

What’s that mean?

Well, with the Fixed Width or Fixed Height settings, you can create shapes (like squares or circles) that maintain their size and shape no matter what screen size the element is displayed on. This means you can now avoid having a desktop view circle shape morph into an oval when shown on mobile sized screens.

Although you won’t end up using this feature every day, it opens up several new possibilities to create advanced shapes using Thrive Architect.

Alternatively, setting a Minimum and Maximum Width and Height for an element will force a shape not to shrink or blow up past your set values — even if there’s room to do so.

The new Width and Height settings also provide you with more units to choose from including:

• Pixels (PX)
• Percentages (%)
• VW (a value of 1 VW is equal to 1% of the viewport width)
• VH (a value of 1 VH is equal to 1% of the viewport height) 

Just click on the unit symbol to open up the dropdown menu of unit options available.

You can also set the value for your units by either clicking and typing numbers into the respective input area or by clicking and dragging your mouse up and down to increase or decrease the value respectively.

In the past, it was a pain to achieve uniform looking content boxes when side-by-side in a column element — especially when the images and text elements contained in them weren’t exactly the same.

Let’s say you were building a benefits and features section for a sales page...

If you had different amounts of text in each side-by-side feature/benefit box, then the bottoms of each box would produce a stair-step look to accommodate the text in each box and throw your nice uniform content box template design out the window.

But with the new Width and Height options, you can now set a Minimum Height setting for all your side-by-side content boxes to ensure they match the size of the tallest feature/benefit box:

That’s a lot quicker — and easier — to setup than endlessly tweaking your text to achieve the specific design you were originally aiming for.

Why is the ability to create such shapes so cool for web design?

Creating Fixed Shapes allows you to modify an element’s internal content without disturbing the shape itself. The shape will also maintain its properties no matter what screen size it’s displayed on.

Alternatively, creating Min & Max Shapes allows the shape to distort itself depending on how its internal content is modified as well as what screen size it’s displayed on.

Depending on your particular design, these features allow you to quickly achieve what you need with very straightforward controls.

As you can tell from this post, these new Thrive Architect features are pretty geeky and probably won’t be tools you use in your usual day-to-day landing page work.

But for advanced designers — including our own Thrive Themes template design team — these features open up some cool design options that weren’t possible before. They also give you more options to tweak what your pages look like on the fly if you’re ever in a design pinch.

How do you like being able to control exactly what your element shapes look like in Thrive Architect using these new Layout & Position features? Let us know what you think of the new interface in the comments section below!