5 things I learned building

5 things I learned building a template through the SVGator MCP Sharing a few things that cost me time while building Receipt Ad entirely through the SVGator MCP, in case they save someone else an evening before the deadline:

1. Transforms pivot around the origin. Set the origin at the pivot point, translate by the negative of that point, then animate the origin to move things. Once that clicks, rotation and scale stop jumping around.

2. The first frame is the preview. If your animation starts empty, the project thumbnail is an empty background. I shifted the timeline so frame 0 shows the finished ad.

3. Check embedded images after every change. Long base64 strings can lose characters on the way in; a static SVG export compared against the source file catches it.

4. Send image edits one at a time. Text and colour edits are fine in parallel; two big image edits at once gave me a 502.

5. Prove the reuse with a fresh session. Giving a new Claude Code session only a one-page brief and asking for a fourth brand was the best test of whether the layer names and structure actually made sense.

Good luck to everyone, the entries this week are really strong.