Using the editor

Tips and tricks for writing your edition

 

Axios HQ will generate your intro card, which includes your logo or banner (if you have one), series title and byline, the date, and Smart Brevity® count.

As you fill out the cards (the sections that your edition is broken into), our Smart Brevity® guidance will help you along the way! You’ll see tips pop up, suggestions made, and general improvement recommendations to help you communicate more effectively.

Table of Contents

• Managing your cards
• Placeholder text 
• Utilizing the toolbar
• Adding images
• Adding polls
• Collaborative Editing
• Recovering deleted editions and text
• Editor Flexibility
• FAQs

Managing your cards

• Add additional cards to your edition by hovering over the space above or below a card and selecting “add new card.”
• There are three options when adding a new card. You can start from scratch or use card templates. 
  • Add a blank card
  • Search cards or describe what you want to write about
  • Select a recommended card 

With Card Templates you can easily grab a card from the HQ card library, or generate a Smart Brevity card template from a prompt.

• Reorder your cards by clicking the collapse button in the upper right corner of any card, dragging your cards around, then expanding them again with the same button. 

Placeholder text

Placeholder text is a text type in Axios HQ and can be identified by the dotted underlines. Templates come with placeholders for writing on a topic in Smart Brevity format, but they may be adjusted and used to create helper text in their editions.

🛠️ How placeholders work:

 

Utilizing the toolbar

You can use the toolbar at the top of the editor to format your text, with options to:

• Bold or italicize text
• Create a bulleted or numbered list
• Turn a paragraph into a blockquote
• Add a hyperlink to the highlighted text
• Select an emoji from our emoji menu
• Add polls and inline images
• ⭐ Change the font size or color of text, add buttons and image collages.
  
  

You can use the floating toolbar that appears when you highlight text, with options to: 

• Bold or italicize text
• ⭐ Change font size and color
• Add a hyperlink or comment to the highlighted text
• Quick access to AI features to shorten, professionalize, or activate text. 
• ⭐ Change the font size or color of text and add buttons.

One fun thing: You can also use the toolbar to add an Axiom – those bolded phrases at the start of a paragraph that help guide your reader’s eye and tell them what to pay attention to.

If you are an admin or owner, you also have the option from this menu to create, edit, or delete custom Axioms for people in your organization to use. Just give your Axiom a name and a brief description for how and when it should be used!

 

Adding Images

Each card can have one featured image just under the headline at the top and as many inline images as you would like. 

• You can add inline images using the image icon in the toolbar at the top of the editor, then resize or choose whether to center or left-justify them. 
• You can crop uploaded images images, banners, or logos using the cropping tool in the upload modal. 
• Featured images cannot be resized in your card but you can resize inline images. 
• For featured images, we recommend a 5:3 aspect ratio. A PNG with dimensions of 1000×600 px is optimal.

Go deeper: Check out our full list of suggested specs for each type of image here.

⭐ Users can create an image collage and use it as the featured image or include it within the text of a card. You have two image collage options to choose from: side by side or a 2x2 grid.

• Go deeper: Check out our article here for instructions on how to add an image collage. 

Axios HQ gives you many images to choose from! In addition to uploading and saving your own pictures, you can access to our library of illustrations from the Axios Visuals team, use stock photos through our partnership with Unsplash, or generate your own using our AI image generator. 

Embedding videos is not currently possible as most email clients (Outlook, Gmail, etc.) do not support videos. We suggest using a screenshot of the video as an image and hyperlinking out to wherever the video is hosted (e.g. the URL to the video on YouTube).

• Once you add the image, you can click on it and a popup menu will give you the option to add a link.
• You can also add a play symbol to the screenshot using an image-editor of your choice, or prompt people to click the image in the caption.

Adding Polls

Engage your audience by using anonymous or identified polls. 

🛠️ How it works: 

• Navigate to the toolbar and select the "Polls"button
• Write your question and options.
• Toggle "Collect individual emails" on to track individual responses.
• Keep the toggle off to keep poll responses anonymous. 
• Click "Save" to add your poll ✅

If you select the identified poll option, the recipient will see the following copy to understand their information will be shared: Your email will be recorded with your response and shared with the sender.

Collaborative Editing

You and your colleagues can work on an edition at the same time. Your teammates’ cursors appear in real-time, showing their contributions in the HQ Editor. You’ll see anybody who’s currently present at the top of the Editor.

• If a user has the Editor open but is not editing (window open and walked away, or scrolling and looking around not inside a card), their avatar turns grey. If a user leaves the Editor, their avatar disappears.

• You can change your profile color by going to the My Profile page and clicking the pencil icon on the circle with your initials.

If you and another collaborator are working in a draft at the same time, you’ll see their cursor with their name and the changes they’re making in real time.

You can see who last edited a card by clicking on the clock icon in the upper right corner of the card to open the Version History sidebar. This shows you a list of previous versions of the card, as well as who has edited it. Select a previous version to see the changes. Hit “Restore” to return the card to an earlier edit.

Recovering deleted editions and text

You have the ability to retrieve a deleted edition within a 30-day window from the date it was deleted. 

To recover a deleted edition: 

• Navigate to your workspace
• Locate the ‘DELETED’ button on the right side of your workspace. Click on it to access the list of deleted editions.  
• Identify the edition that you would like to recover and select the three dots next to the creator’s name.
• Select ‘Restore to drafts,’ the recovered draft will now appear in your drafts tab. 

Keep in mind, you can only recover editions within a 30- day timeframe. Deleted series and cards cannot be recovered. 

To recover deleted text:

• Navigate to the undo button in the toolbar, the keyboard shortcut Cmd+Z (Mac) / Ctrl+Z (Windows), or from the Version History sidebar. However, deleted cards cannot be recovered.

Editor Flexibility

Modify or remove HQ series elements to customize your update’s formatting with Editor Flexibility. More flexibility in the editor – combined with the Smart Brevity principles that work – means you can use HQ to send all types of essential comms, like one-card notes and important announcements. 

• At the series-level, collaborators can now enable or disable the title, byline, or Smart Brevity word count for a series. This will impact all editions of the series. 
  • Go to Settings > Design
  • Click the checkboxes under “Intro card customization.”
• At the edition-level, you can edit the title or byline for a specific edition in the Editor itself. Just note these updates will only affect that specific edition — not others in its series.
• To delete an intro or outro card, click the three-dot menu in the card’s upper right corner, and select Delete.
• To re-add an intro or outro card, hover in the gray space where it used to be, and you’ll see a prompt to add it.

FAQs

Will these card templates be enabled with Smart Brevity prompts and suggestions?

Template styling is intended to tell you how to write in Smart Brevity format, but Smart Brevity prompts are not enabled at this time.

Will these card templates pull from client archived content or saved edition templates created with the organization?

Not at this time, potentially a future enhancement.

Can I comment on or assign a collaborator to a specific placeholder?

We won’t be supporting this in the initial release. Assignments for placeholders may be created near the placeholder (on regular text), or at the card level.

Will placeholders appear in my send?

No, they will be absent from both test and actual sends. Placeholders will only appear in the HQ editor and template previews.

What is the new placeholder text style?

Placeholder styling (found in the floating toolbar: the letter ‘T’ with a dotted underline), is a customized style option which may be applied to any body text inside a card. When someone clicks a placeholder, the entire text is selected, making it simple for that person to fill in the content asked for.

Can I create my own card templates?

We don’t currently support saving custom card templates to your workspace at this time, however, placeholder text is available everywhere the editor is. This means you can create your own card template library in an edition template, or, use the content archive to pull in card templates from another draft in your series.

My series isn’t an all staff, can I still use HQ card templates?

Our library and recommendations may not be as applicable for you, however, you can still search our library for topics or generate a template on any topic you wish if you cannot find one that suits your needs.

How do topic recommendations work?

Card recommendations are powered by a set of smart algorithms that take into account a series’ history as well as other edition context, returning three suggested templates when creating a new card. These suggestions are backed by research into All Staff sends. This research is based on aggregated data from machine-labeling techniques which label, generalize, and unlocked insights into topic trends.

How many card templates are in the HQ library, what topics do they cover?

Hundreds at the time of writing. The topics cover a diverse set of themes communicated in All Staff series. Examples include: employee spotlights, event details, tool migration announcements, new hire announcements, project updates, company news, and many more!

Can I preview my series?

Our editor very closely reflects what your edition will look like. Additionally, we recommend always sending a test to yourself to double check how your edition renders in email. There is also the option to preview your customization options (series title, author name, colors, fonts, and banner or logo) on the Settings page.

I’m having trouble with formatting when I copy and paste into the editor. What should I do?

We recommend pasting without formatting: Cmd+Opt+Shift+V on Mac or Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows.

What image file types are supported?

We support PNG and JPG images. GIFs also work for featured and inline images, but you cannot use a GIF for your banner or logo. For a high quality image, we recommend using PNGs over JPGs.

How do I delete a series?

Navigate to the settings tab of the series you would like to delete. Select general and scroll to the bottom and you will see a 'Delete series' button. Deleted series cannot be recovered. 

Can I recover deleted a series and cards?

Unfortunately, you cannot recover a series or cards at this time. 

Can you use the cropping tool on Axios Visuals, Stock Photos, and AI generated images? 

Not at this time. The cropping tool is only available for uploaded images, banners, and logos. If you have any feedback on this using the link below. 

How can I link to an email address?

You can use the hyperlink feature. Highlight the text then click on the link icon. Enter mailto:email-address in the text box.

Can recipients respond to a poll on the web?

If link access is set to “Recipients only” or “Recipients and current audience” then readers will be able to respond to polls on the web. 

Will we be able to see poll results in the analytics report download (CSV file)? 

Yes! You can download the edition report to view poll results.