The first step is to create a Storyboard project within the Storyboard Designer desktop environment. When Photoshop design content is available, it can be directly imported and forms the basis of a new Storyboard application. In this scenario, the initial width and height of the screens are set to be the Photoshop canvas size. All of the layers within the Photoshop file are maintained as Storyboard layers and all of the rendered Photoshop content is imported as controls with image or text render extensions.

If Photoshop content is not available for import to bootstrap an application, a Storyboard project can be started from scratch. A new project wizard walks through the process of setting up the initial project parameters such as the target screen size. This creates a blank project with a single screen and a single layer.

Regardless of the starting point, using Photoshop import or starting with a blank application, a Storyboard project initially has a single model file named the same as the project and the file extension GDE. This GDE file contains the structure of the application, the event and action bindings, and the variable and animation definitions.