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Shape

A shape is a flexible template made up of pieces and/or components such as rich text, videos, and files. Shapes define the basic structure of your catalogue items (products, documents, and folders).

Custom product shape

Information Architecture and Content Modeling

Information architecture, when properly designed, allows for building out rich customer experiences as well as simple re-use of product and marketing content across any channel.

Within Crystallize, shapes are the building blocks of IA. Before defining shapes, you’ll need to perform content modeling to determine what data/content you wish to store and how to organize it. To facilitate this process, Crystallize offers a content modeling design system in Figma. To give you a better idea on how to use it for your project, we've written a detailed post explaining it. We’ve also made a series of content modeling livestreams.

Defining Shapes

Once you’ve completed content modeling, you’re ready to:

It’s best to define your shapes before you begin populating your catalogue. Whenever you create a product, document, or folder, you assign its shape at the time of creation. You can’t change this assignment later on

Shapes are defined using any number of pieces and/or components, which can be combined to create rich product descriptions, including but not limited to:

The image below contains the product shape used for all products in our demo tenant.

Product shape example
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