Photoshop is a very powerful photo editor but not really suited towards cranking out decent quality batters at a quick rate. Does anyone know of a better tool for fast banner/creative creation?
I've never found anything faster than Photoshop, tbh, unless you were to get into custom ImageMagick scripts and the like (and even then, you can replicate those trivially with a Photoshop script).
What would your target banners / hour be?
This requires a good knowledge of HTML and CSS, but what I do is create my first banner in HTML and make it as perfect as I want, then you can easily change multiple components at once to create multiple variations of the same banner.
For example, if you coded your CSS in an ideal way, it would look like this (it doesn't have to group multiple styles like this into one rule, it just makes it more efficient when looping):
<style>
div#cta, h4.headline, div#container {
background-color: #c10;
}
</style>
<?PHP
// this is quick and sloppy and not tested or anything
$CTAColors = ["#c10", "#eee", "#555", "dedede"];
$headlines = ["Headline1", "Headline2", "Headline3"];
foreach($CTAColors as $color) {
foreach($headlines as $headline) {
echo "<style>div#cta, h4.headline, div#container {background-color: $color;}</style>";
echo "<div id='container'><h4 class='headline'>$headline</h4><div id='cta'>Click Here!</div></div>";
}
}
?>
What about: http://ibannerengine.com
Actually I'd love to know what the mods & experienced guys do in terms of banners per hour. What would a good goal be for max efficiency?
I just started using Photoshop again for the first time since high school (12 years ago), and I can tell I'm painfully slow and clumsy at it. I know I'll get better with practice and learning the keyboard shortcuts, but would be more motivating to have a goal in mind.
I think automating stuff like borders, border and CTA colours, buttons etc. are minor changes that have low to moderate impact on your banner performance cf. the overall composition.
You would be better off getting better at Photoshop and pumping out unique creatives quickly.
1. Learn the keyboard shortcuts e.g. V for pointer, m for marquee, alt+backspace, ctrl+clicking, square brackets for brush size, etc.
2. Use File > Scripts > Export layers to files when you have a lot of flattened layers
3. Save layer styles for cool CTA buttons and never waste time tweaking button colours again! Just click2change.
4. Save templates for banner sizes and make a well-organised folder of elements you can drag/drop in.
5. Make use of glorious webfonts from Creative Cloud.
Most of the guys who do high volume hire VA's. Easy way to crank out 100s of banners per day.
For me it's pretty easy to smash through a ton of banners in a pretty short amount of time. I wouldn't look at anything else but Photoshop now. I love it. It just takes a bit of getting used to.
As has already been suggested make sure you learn the keyboard shortcuts.
If something doesn't have a shortcut or you don't like the shortcut then change it to suit you. The ideal is that you use your mouse purely for the design work rather than finding tools.
The second biggest feature for me is the Actions panel. If I'm making a ton of changes to ads that follow the same pattern I can record the process for one banner and apply to every other I need to. It quite literally takes seconds to switch up 10s of banners as I need them.
More banners in less time isn't always the best idea.
You should be aiming for different style banners, and unique angles for each banner. For this you want custom made stuff thats thoroughly thought out. Speedy software can't do that.
EDIT: Just read Zeno's post which is spot on!
Hiring or outsourcing it to a VA or graphic designer would make the process faster. Most of them already have the software and knowledge necessary, making it cheaper in the long run.