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🎯 Advanced Styling for Professional Missing Pieces Puzzles

Overview

Want your puzzles to look clean, balanced, and visually polished — even with multiple missing pieces?
This tutorial shows how to fine-tune layout and styling using two powerful features: Padding and the “Allow Single Color / Whitespace Pieces” option.

These tools help prevent overlapping, improve contrast, and ensure every puzzle feels professionally designed and printer-ready.

Required Modules

Preparation

Before you start:

  • Load your image(s) in the Images tab
  • Select or create a shape (built-in or SVG)
  • Configure your basic puzzle settings (see Getting Started tutorial)

This tutorial focuses on the Style and Settings tabs.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Understand Padding

  • Go to the Style tab
  • In the Piece Styling section, locate the Padding control
  • Padding sets the minimum distance between missing pieces, as a percentage of the piece size
  • In most cases the distance between missing pieces will be far more than the minimum
  • This setting is also used for the solution pieces

Best Practices:

  • For puzzles with 1–2 missing pieces → 0–5% padding
  • For puzzles with 3+ pieces → 10–25% for clean spacing
  • Avoid 0% if you want each missing piece to stand out clearly

2. Control Piece Contrast: “Allow Single Color / Whitespace Pieces”

  • Go to the Settings tab
  • In the Difficulty section, locate Allow Single Color / Whitespace Pieces
  • By default, this is enabled to support older behavior
  • Turn it OFF to prevent pieces that:
  • Are entirely white or transparent
  • Might be fully black in silhouette-style puzzles

When this is off, Puzzle Maker Pro automatically skips those pieces and finds better options.

The setting applies to the missing pieces only. The solution pieces will be identical to the missing pieces, but distractor pieces can be single color.

3. Combine Both for Cleaner Layouts

By combining Padding and the color/whitespace filter, you ensure:

  • Pieces are spaced out (no overlap)
  • Distractors are visible and distinguishable
  • Coloring puzzles or silhouette puzzles don’t break immersion

This is especially helpful for:

  • 🧩 3–5 piece puzzles
  • 🎨 Coloring-image puzzles
  • 🧠 Therapeutic and educational books
  • 📚 KDP titles where puzzle clarity = review success

Outcome

You’ve learned how to:

  • Use Padding to prevent crowding in multi-piece puzzles
  • Filter out invisible or hard-to-see distractors
  • Improve the visual quality and accessibility of your puzzles

These small tweaks make a big difference in how your puzzles are perceived — and how fast they pass QA in KDP or with clients.

Further Reading

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