Help! What's your workflow for making multiple web banners???

[Giles]

Hello,

I'm a complete beginner on both creating banners and Pixelmator - forgive me if this is an obvious question but I've not found the answer anywhere online.

I need to create three sets of Google Ad (Adsense) display banners in ten sizes.

At the moment I have one document per set with grouped layers for each size. It is proving very slow to add the image, headline, logo, button to each one - thirty times in all

I am sure there must be a smarter way to do it. This tutorial https://moreniche.com/blog/design-banne ... photoshop/ has a Photoshop workflow using one artboard and smart objects - it seems to be the thing but I can't find anything similar for Pixelmator.

Has anyone got any suggestions - or can you share how you do it?

Many thanks

G

[st3f]

Hi Giles.

As far as I know, Pixelmator doesn't have a way of holding aliases to objects so there's no way to update a logo in one place and have that change cascade through all instances. That said, there are a few tools you can use to speed up the process. I don't know how many of these you are already using so please forgive me if I'm telling you things you already know. Feel free to cherry-pick or ignore anything I say wholesale.

1. Create a template file to speed up creating each group of banners. I'm guessing you're already doing this but, just in case you're not I thought I'd mention it. Also, add items 2, 3 and 5 below to your template.
2. Use guides in Pixelmator to indicate the placement of objects. I find it much quicker to move an element into place if it can snap against a guide. If you're resizing the icons before-hand (see 4), you only need guides to indicate one corner (although you might prefer to use four guides to indicate all four corners to ensure you are using the right size logo).
3. Create a locked group with placeholder objects and instructions. You can hide this before export and, if you come to use the template several months down the line, it'll help you remember what you are doing. Also, you can snap to placeholder objects rather than guides (you'll need fewer guides) if you have Show guides at object edges or Show guides at object center turned on (Preferences > Rulers).
4. Use automator to create multiple instances of a logo at all the sizes you need. If your banners are going to need 5 different sizes of logo, create 5 Automator applications (or, if you're very familiar with it, one Automator app) to resize the logos outside of Pixelmator then drag all 5 onto your canvas in one go and duplicate as necessary (or duplicate files outside and drag all 10). If you're finding text to be a pain, you could create the text once in a separate (large) file, export as a bitmap and resize using Automator. Of course, if your text wraps differently in each banner that is not going to be possible.
5. Use Slices to export. That way you can save all ten banners at once. It's pretty much the equivalent functionality to an art-board.

Hope this helps.

- Stef.

[Giles]

Stef, that's GREAT. Thank you so much.

1 I'm doing
2, 3, 4 I'm not doing and get all of it, really helpful
I have no idea about slices and am going to Google that now.

Thank you for the thoughtful and quick reply

G

[st3f]

You're very welcome. Slices are here: http://help.pixelmator.com/mac/3.6/#136