A frame is a labelled, transparent box you draw around a cluster of elements to say "this part is a thing". It lives in the Build category, and F draws one wherever your pointer is.
Its body has no fill, so everything inside shows through, and its label sits in the top-left corner. Rename it the way you rename anything else, by double-clicking the label.
It is a section, not a rectangle
That distinction is the whole element. Four behaviours follow from it:
- It always draws behind its contents, whatever order things were added in. You never have to send a frame to the back, and one can't accidentally cover the work it is framing.
- Clicking inside picks the element, not the frame. Click an element in a frame and you get the element. Click empty space inside it, or its border or title, and you get the frame. So a frame never gets in the way of the thing it holds.
- Moving the frame carries what is inside it. The section travels as one, arrows between members included. Membership is worked out at the moment you grab it, so an element is "in" a frame simply by sitting inside it; there is nothing to add it to. Containment has to be full: an element straddling the edge stays put, because a frame that grabbed its half-out neighbours would read as grabbing things at random.
- Resizing the frame leaves its contents alone. Only the outline grows, so you size the section around the work rather than scaling the work.
Being a backdrop rather than a node, a frame has no quick-connect + buttons and is not something you can morph another shape into.
What else reads a frame
A frame is the one element other features treat as "a section", which is what makes it worth reaching for beyond tidiness:
- A slide with exactly one frame on it is framed by that frame when you present it, rather than by a box drawn round its elements. That is how you author precise framing for a slide deck without learning a second concept.
- Exports keep the layering, so a frame is behind its contents in a PNG or SVG exactly as on the canvas. See Exporting.
Frames and groups
A frame and a group both make several elements move together, and they are not the same tool.
A group is a fixed membership you declare: those elements, wherever they end up. A frame is a region, so its membership is whatever is sitting inside it right now, and dragging something in or out changes what moves with it. Reach for a group when the set is the point, and a frame when the area is.
Lay the frames down first and fill them in. A board that starts as four named empty sections is easier to write into than one you tidy into sections afterwards.
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