A social media template saves you the same twenty minutes every week: the layout, the fonts, the frame for the portrait, where the name goes. In most design tools you still have to paste the character's name, find the picture and retype the quote each time. In Lokee the template knows where those come from. Each slot is tied to a field of an entity in your vault, so a new post is one choice of character away.
This guide builds one from start to finish in the Create studio: a "Wanted by the Crown Watch" poster for the demo story The Ashen Circle, where Magistrate Ophelia Crane hunts the rebels of Duskhollow. We place the elements, tie them to entity fields, pick a background, turn it into a carousel, add a call to action, save it, share it as a file, and let AI draft a variant. If you want the bigger picture of what to post and when, marketing your book from your story bible covers that.
What a social media template is in Lokee
The Create section of every vault has two pages. Creatives are your designs: a single post or a carousel of up to 10 slides, in one of four sizes, Square 1080×1080, Portrait 1080×1350, Story 1080×1920 or Landscape 1200×675. Templates are reusable designs with empty slots.
A slot is an element that has forgotten its content but remembers its source. The picture frame says "entity 1, picture". The big line says "entity 1, name". The small box under it says "entity 1, description". Everything you did not turn into a slot, such as the word WANTED, a border or your own logo, stays exactly as you designed it.
When you open a template and choose an entity, Auto-fill pours the right part of each field into each slot. Lady Iseult Varnhold today, Rowan Ashe next week, and the series looks like a series because the layout never moved.
That is also why a template gets better as your vault does. If you are still deciding what a character card should contain, a story bible that scales is the place to start; a template built on tidy types fills cleanly, one built on twenty half-filled fields does not.
Start from a starter or a blank slide
Lokee ships 14 starter templates on every plan, and they are the quickest way to see how slots behave. On the Templates page they sit under Starter templates: character, place, faction, object and creature cards, single posts such as Quote post and "Who is…?" intro, and carousels such as Character deep-dive and Cast of characters. Each one has Use, which opens it as a new creative, and Edit a copy, which opens a copy you can change and keep with Save a copy to this vault.
For your own design I recommend a different route: build it as a creative with a real entity filled in, then turn it into a template. You see real names and real text while you design, so you notice at once when a long name breaks the layout.
- Open Creatives and choose New creative.
- Pick Blank and the Portrait size. A wanted poster is taller than it is wide, and portrait posts take up more of a phone screen than square ones.
- Give it a name at the top of the editor, say "Wanted poster", so you can find it later. The editor saves as you work; the status next to Undo and Redo says Saved.
If a starter is close to what you want, start from it instead with From a template. It is easier to delete three elements than to place eight.
Place elements and bind them to entity fields
The editor has four tabs on the side: Elements, Vault data, Background and Format. Start with Elements.
Text adds a text box with a role: Title, Body, Quote, Caption or Tags. Under Picture, Upload a picture adds an image of your own (PNG, JPEG or WebP; large pictures are shrunk to 1 MB); your entities' pictures come from Vault data. Shapes gives rectangles, ellipses, lines, triangles and hexagons. Under More you find a Stat block, a Map snippet, an empty Template slot (Add slot) and Call to action….
For the poster:
- a Title text that says WANTED, in capitals, across the top;
- a portrait in the middle (it comes from Vault data in a moment), with Frame shape set to Arch and a border;
- a Title text under it for the name;
- a Body text for one line about the person;
- a Stat block for two or three facts;
- a Quote text at the bottom.
Drag, resize and rotate on the canvas. Elements snap to slide edges, centres and each other; hold Alt to place one freely, and Shift to keep its proportions. Double-click a text to type into it. Text that is too long shrinks to fit between the Largest size and the Smallest size you set in the inspector, and when even the smallest size is not enough, a red frame and Text doesn't fit tell you so. The dashed guides around frames show only on hover or selection, never in the preview or the export.
Now the part that makes it a template. Open Vault data, search for Rowan Ashe and press Use for auto-fill: he becomes entity 1. The tab lists his pictures, his name and text, his quotes and his attributes. Drag his portrait onto the canvas, or click a piece to add it to the current slide.
A dragged piece is plain content: Rowan's portrait stays Rowan's. To make an element follow whoever is entity 1, select it and, in the inspector under Auto-fill, tick Fill from an entity. Two selects appear: which entity (#1 to #10) and which field: Name, Type, Description, Picture, Tags, Stats, Pinned quote, or One attribute with its name. Bind the portrait, the name line, the body text, the stat block and the quote this way. From then on, choosing an entity fills all of them at once. The other route is a Template slot: an empty picture or text frame that only auto-fill fills.
Choose what each slot shows with Change
Auto-fill does not pour a whole field into a box. It picks a part that fits:
- a description gets its first paragraph if that fits comfortably, otherwise its first sentence, with Markdown removed;
- tags get as many as the box holds;
- a stat block gets the first four short attributes, never a long text;
- a quote slot gets the pinned quote, or the shortest quote that fits.
Select a bound element and press Change (or Change… in the inspector) to pick something else. For a description you choose Best fit, First sentence, First paragraph or My own text. For a quote you get the entity's quotes as a list, with a Quote category filter and Previous quote and Next quote arrows. Tags and attributes come as checkboxes. Another entity… switches the entity and keeps your choices.
For the poster, set the Body text to First sentence. Rowan's description in the demo starts "A former city-guard scout turned informant for the Ashen Circle." That is exactly the line a magistrate would print.
If you rewrite a filled text by hand, Lokee keeps your version the next time it fills; the inspector says so. Refill, in the Auto-fill: bar above the canvas, replaces those too when you want a clean slate.
Several entities in one design
The entity number in a slot matters once a design shows more than one person. A "Wanted: the Ashen Circle" post with three small portraits needs slots for entity 1, 2 and 3. The Auto-fill: bar then shows Choose entity 1, Choose entity 2 and so on, and each button fills its own slots. Carousels use the same idea, one entity per slide.
Give the series one look: backgrounds and calls to action
A series is recognised by its background before anyone reads a word. Background offers a Solid colour, Generated backgrounds, Textures and a Photo with filters. Generated backgrounds have sliders for Blur, Scatter and Colour jitter, plus a Seed; Shuffle gives you a new variation with the same settings.
For the poster, the Old paper texture with a dark Tint looks like something nailed to a door in Duskhollow.
Not every background is on every plan. Every plan has 8 generated backgrounds and 2 textures; Pro adds 10 more backgrounds and 5 more textures. In a cloud vault the vault owner's plan decides which ones you see, and a design that uses a Pro background cannot be exported from a vault whose owner is not on Pro. A local vault in the desktop app has the whole set.
Then the call to action, the line that tells a stranger what to do next. Call to action… under Elements opens a picker with two lists. Ready to use has about ten lines, such as Follow for more, Link in bio and Read the whole story, translated into your language. Your own holds lines you type and Save: signed in they are kept in your account, signed out on this computer or in this browser. For a wanted poster, "Whose side are you on?" from the ready-made list fits rather well.
In a template the call to action can be a slot too. Its source is Call to action, and the inspector offers Choose a call to action…, so each post can end with a different line without anyone retyping it.
Carousels with pictures that cross the slide edge
One poster is a post. Five posters, swiped, are a manhunt. Format changes the size and the slides: Add slide up to 10, Move slide left or right, Delete slide.
Elements travel with their slide. The trick that makes a carousel feel designed is a picture that crosses the edge between two slides. Drag a picture so it sits over the line between slide 1 and slide 2: when people swipe, half of it leaves with the first slide and the other half arrives with the second. Lokee cuts it at the slide edge in the preview and in every export, so the halves meet exactly. The Character deep-dive starter does this with its portrait between slides 1 and 2, if you want to see it before building your own.
For the manhunt carousel, put a title slide first ("The Crown Watch is looking for these people"), then one slide per suspect with slots for entity 1, 2, 3 and so on, and let one picture cross the edge between the title slide and the first suspect.
Open Preview before you export. Carousel preview shows the slides edge to edge, as people will swipe them: swipe, drag or use the arrow keys. Show thin lines between slides draws a hairline divider if you want to check where the cuts fall. If slide four bores you, cut it.
Save it as a template and choose where it lives
When the poster looks right with Rowan in it, choose Save as template. The dialog has two halves.
On the left, Slots lists the elements that can become slots; bound elements, pictures and stat blocks start ticked. Ticked elements become empty slots, each with its source shown and changeable. Unticked elements stay exactly as designed. Leave WANTED and the border unticked, tick the picture, the name, the description, the stat block and the quote.
On the right: Name, Description, Example of use and Category, then Keep it in:
| Choice | Where it lives | Who can use it |
|---|---|---|
| This vault | inside the vault, so it syncs and travels in exports and restore points | everyone who works in this vault |
| My account library | your account | you, in every vault you open while signed in; Sync and Pro |
| This device | this computer, or this browser on the web | you, on this computer or browser only, signed in or not |
Then Save template. The new template appears on the Templates page under This vault's templates, My account library or On this device. From there, Use starts a creative from it and Edit opens it in the template editor, where Template details changes its name and description and Save template saves your changes.
A practical rule: keep templates for one book in This vault, so a co-author sees them and a restore point brings them back. Use the account library for designs you reuse across books, such as your author-brand quote card.
Share it as a .lokee-template.json file
Download template file in the save dialog, or Download file on the Templates page, saves the template as a readable .lokee-template.json file: plain JSON with the slides, the elements, their positions and the slots' sources. Pictures you uploaded and kept as part of the design travel inside it; the slots stay empty.
To bring one in, use Import template file… on the Templates page, check the name Lokee shows, choose Import into and press Import. A file that is not a valid template is refused with This file cannot be used as a template: and the reasons. This works on every plan, so it is also how you move a template between vaults without the account library, or pass one to a co-author.
Two things to check after an import. A map snippet keeps the map and region it was made with; in another vault, use Change map region… to pick one of that vault's maps. And a template from a Pro account may use a Pro background, which a free vault cannot export; swap the background and it is fine.
Let AI draft a template from a prompt
Sometimes you know what you want and not how to lay it out. New creative, then From a prompt (AI), asks What should it look like? Describe it ("a wanted poster on old paper, a large arched portrait, the name in heavy capitals, one line of description and a reward line"), pick the Format, the number of Slides and the Language, and press Generate and open.
The result opens in the editor as an ordinary design with slots, which you fill and change like anything else. If it is good, Save as template. If the draft cannot be used, the credits are refunded.
It costs 3 credits. Lokee credits for the Create studio's AI need the Pro plan; in a cloud vault, Lokee credits are the only option, and the vault owner's plan and credits count. In a local vault in the desktop app you can use your own OpenAI or Anthropic key, or a local model, from the vault's AI setup, on any plan and without Lokee credits. There is never a field for a key in the studio itself.
Before the first run, and whenever you click Where does my data go?, a Before you send notice names who receives the request: Lokee's AI provider (Anthropic Claude) when you pay with Lokee credits, OpenAI or Anthropic under your own account when you use your own key, or nobody with a local model, where nothing leaves your computer. For a template the request holds your description, the format, the number of slides and the language, not your vault. I understand, continue sends it.
The same rules cover the other helper, AI caption, which writes a post description, hashtags and three background-music ideas for a finished creative for 1 credit. Music ideas are words, not audio.
Export, and when the Lokee badge appears
Export in the creative editor offers PNG or JPG (one file per slide), a ZIP of every slide as PNG or JPG, and a PDF carousel for places that take documents.
Exports carry a small Lokee badge unless you or the vault's owner are on Sync or Pro. The rule is the same in the desktop app: in a local vault the plan of the account you are signed in with decides, and signed out the badge stays. The export menu tells you when the badge will appear, and the pricing page shows what each plan includes. The template file itself is data and never carries a badge.
Common mistakes
Binding everything. If the WANTED heading is a slot, the next fill replaces it with a name. Bind what changes between posts; leave the frame of the series alone.
Designing with placeholder text. Lorem ipsum fits every box. "Magistrate Ophelia Crane" does not. Design with your longest real name filled in, and set a sensible Smallest size, so the template survives the worst case.
The whole description in a small box. If a slot shows the first paragraph and the box is small, you get tiny text or a red frame. Set it to First sentence, or write descriptions whose first sentence can stand alone, which is good practice for a story bible anyway.
Spoilers through auto-fill. Auto-fill takes what the vault says, including the attribute that reveals who is secretly funding the rebels. Check the stat block of every post, and untick with Change whatever the reader should not know yet.
Keeping a book's templates only on the device. This device keeps a template in this browser or this desktop app only. Templates kept there do not sync or travel with the vault; if they matter, save them in This vault or download the file.
An imported template that will not export. A Pro background in a vault whose owner is not on Pro blocks the export. Pick another background.
What Lokee doesn't do here
Lokee makes still images and PDF carousels. It does not make video or animated posts, does not post to Instagram, TikTok or anywhere else, and does not schedule posts. The music ideas are text. There is no public template library yet: templates are shared as files. And a template only knows what your vault knows; it does not invent facts to fill an empty slot.
A checklist for your next template
- Start with a real entity, preferably the one with the longest name.
- Place the fixed parts first: heading, border, logo.
- Bind the parts that change with Fill from an entity, fill them with Use for auto-fill, and set each source with Change.
- Pick a background from the set your plan offers, and remember the seed you liked.
- Add a call to action, as a fixed line or as a slot.
- For a carousel, add slides, lay one picture across an edge and check it in Preview.
- Save as template in This vault, or in My account library if you will reuse it across books.
- Download the file as a backup or to share it.
- Fill it with a second entity before you call it done.
If your characters move around the world, a map spotlight in the same style is a good companion series; following characters across the map gives you the places worth showing. Every button and limit mentioned here is also listed in the Create help section.