Layer Groups

Once a design has more than a handful of layers, some of them naturally belong together — a badge made of a circle and a label, a logo lockup of an icon and text, a card built from a background shape, an image, and a caption. Grouping lets you treat that cluster as one unit: move it, resize it, or restyle it together instead of wrangling each layer individually.

Creating a group

Select two or more layers — on canvas with shift-click, or from the layers panel by shift-clicking multiple rows — and group them. The group appears in the layers panel as a single collapsible row, with its members nested underneath. Selecting the group row selects everything inside it; expand it to reach an individual child layer without breaking up the group.

Ungrouping

Ungrouping reverses the operation: the group row is removed and its former children return to being independent top-level layers (or nested inside whatever group contained the group, if it was itself nested), keeping their current visual position and size. Nothing about the layers themselves changes — ungrouping is purely a change to organization, not content.

Group-relative coordinates

Internally, a grouped layer's position is stored relative to its group, not relative to the frame. This is what makes groups behave predictably when you move or resize them: drag the group, and every child's position shifts with it because their coordinates are anchored to the group's own origin, not to fixed frame coordinates that would otherwise need updating individually for every child.

This also matters if you're ever thinking about layer positions programmatically or via AI: a hierarchy of grouped layers with relative coordinates is a different shape of data than a flat list of frame-absolute layers. When the AI applies changes to a design, it works with flattened, frame-absolute positions and reconstitutes groups afterward — which is invisible to you as a user, but explains why grouping/ungrouping is a clean, lossless operation rather than something that risks scrambling positions.

Resizing a group

Resizing a group scales its children proportionally within it — stretch the group wider, and everything inside stretches (or repositions, depending on each child's own sizing behavior) to match, the same way resizing a single shape scales that shape. This is the main practical payoff of grouping: a badge or card built from several layers can be resized as a whole without manually re-adjusting each piece's size and position to keep it looking right.

Nesting groups

Groups can contain other groups, so you can build up a hierarchy — individual elements grouped into a component, several components grouped into a larger section — the same way you might nest folders. Each level of nesting still resolves down to group-relative coordinates, so the same resize and move behavior applies consistently regardless of how deep the nesting goes.

Groups and selection

Groups interact directly with alignment and selection tooling: selecting a group and using alignment guides treats the group's bounding box as the unit being aligned, not its individual children. See Selection, Alignment & Smart Guides for how snapping behaves once a group is part of a selection.

What's excluded from AI grouping

One exception worth knowing: when the AI generates or edits a design, sticker layers (image placeholders awaiting AI-generated artwork) are deliberately excluded from AI-created groups, even if they're visually adjacent to grouped content. This keeps sticker generation — which happens as a separate, asynchronous step — from getting tangled up with group membership before the artwork exists. It doesn't affect manual grouping; you can still group a sticker layer with other content yourself once its artwork has resolved.

A practical rule of thumb

Group when several layers are functionally one thing — a logo lockup, a badge, a card — and you'd naturally want them to move, resize, or get deleted together. Don't group just to tidy the layers panel; if two layers only happen to be near each other but serve unrelated purposes, keeping them independent gives you more flexibility to adjust one without dragging the other along.