Creating ads is fun. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of coming up with the concept, pitching your idea, and selling it in. And then, you get to the real work: production and resizing.
It’s at this stage that a lot of creatives get the life sucked out of them. The tedious repetition of copying, pasting, repositioning, breaking lines of copy is definitely the least exciting part of the job. It must be done — how else will your brilliant idea get out into the wild to be seen by millions? But, like the infomercials of yore used to say, there’s got to be a better way.
Here are three ways I’ve personally used to speed up the ad resizing process, each one more efficient than the next.
Using a template like this one from Envato quickly starts you off with artboards in the sizes you need. From here, you’ll have to reconfigure the design from your original ad concept into each additional ad size. The fastest way is to copy and paste your layers into each new placement. Then adjust those layers to fit within the new space.
While the template gives you a slight head start, this process is still super manual and time-consuming. And once you’re finished you really only have one version of your ad resized — bad news if you’re running more than one version of an ad and/or testing your creative.
Apps like RelayThat or Pencil add a level of automation to the ad resizing process. Upon uploading your original ad concept, these apps will automatically resize images, text, and design elements to fit within the selected, additional ad sizes.
The added automation definitely saves some of the tedious work inherent in resizing. But there’s still a decent amount of adjustments involved — small tweaks here and there to make the ads look just right. And, again, once you’re finished, you’ll just have one version of your ad resized.
Using Marpipe’s Placement Variants feature is the fastest way possible to resize your ads. When you choose a new ad size, your artboard automatically readjusts while you tweak the elements to fit the layout needed for the new size. Each edit you make saves automatically to the specific size that’s been adjusted. Switching between sizes, you will see that each layout changes based on your previous tweaks.
Marpipe also saves your work for later. So if another ad size is needed further down the road — perhaps a new channel is added to the media buy or your brand expands its social presence to another platform — you can come back and add it quickly.
There’s a reason production work like ad resizing feels soul-crushing for creatives. It keeps them from coming up with the next great idea. Automating these tedious tasks gives creatives time back to do what they do best.
