In the digital era, creative banners have a major role to attract visitors. Banners are forever a requirement. It is not only for promotions campaigns. We are moving into serving a personalized user journey e.g. Persona, Buying behavior, Location, Language, here we need segment-specific banners.
We all agreed to an extent, banner design delivery manually can be handled by adding more design resources or it can be managed by some paid tool/service. but as soon as you scale, then you have to serve a larger audience and then you may face the challenge of managing design resources & service cost. And the question arises;
How do you create hundreds and thousands of customized images in less than 30 minutes?
When does this happen to me?
One of the projects in Purplle.com we have to deliver thousands of banners in multiple dimensions and multiple styles that are going to be served for the personalized user journey.
We have two options to get it done on the estimated time.
- Add more design resources. I guess you know what’s the challenge of getting design resources, especially for a shorter duration.
- Get it done by any paid tools/service. Again here cost is another barrier that you have to evaluate with the project and their expected outcome.
If there is a problem then there will be a solution
Now it was time to solve this problem so that the available design resource time can be saved and the expenditure on unnecessary resources can be saved as well as the other teams who depend on the designer can also be facilitated.
What have I tried first?
At first, I tried the data set option in Photoshop and in the initial attempt, I got success and understood that it is possible. Now I had to make a template and understand the way the requirement was going to the designer. So that both can be aligned together.
In this experiment, banners were being created, but there was a concern raised that could not be denied, such as the creation of many .psd files and then making them .jpg files through Action. This made another file management headache and disk space a challenge as well.
Where there is a will, there is a way
Adobe XD is an application known for UI & Prototype design. One feature in this application that used to do replace dummy text and image with realistic data on all the screens in minimum time. It allows you to define and create your own data as per your requirement.
I did a test and run it with my requirement and get it done, it was time-saving and lightweight to use now no more headache on file and space management. We produced thousands of banners in less than 30 minutes.
Some pre-preparation will have to be done to do this.
- Layout: Design a banner template
- Brand Logo: Save the same size and store it in one folder. Keep in mind file ordering of files will be placed in the series of banners. I used to write here the number in the first alphabet for each file name.
- Discount Text: create a text file write text in each line
- Banner Text: create a text file write text in each line
- Product Image: same as logo create png file and store in a separate folder
- Background: design background image and store it in a separate folder.
You’re ready to go.
Conclusion
I did not stop it here. I made a demo and presented it to the design team and discussed the possibilities where it can be facilitated for promotions.
We had #LargestMakeupSale @ purplle.com. Our creative fellow had a big smile on their face 🙂 in this sale. After this design team started time utilization into focusing on having more creative stuff.
I love to hear more about it, how you and your team managing creative at scale, How likely you are going to use this approach.