How I stopped worrying and learned to love auto layout
Less Is (Sometimes) More
Quality templates are at the core of Render. Allowing dynamic content to scale and fit into a beautiful layout is a very – maybe even infinitely – hard task. The more elements and the more flexibility to tell the right message, the more difficult it is.
But that is what we aim to solve here at the Render factory. Our most advanced templates support more than 40 elements (text, images, splashes, prices etc.) and through transformations and beautiful ratios, we build quality ads.
Today, however, we will showcase some of our video templates, with fewer dynamic elements and more constraints. Templates that reduce the complexity and give a bit more freedom for animations and orchestrated fireworks, which works great for SoMe-channels that are geared for short concise messages.
How I stopped worrying and learned to love auto layout
In marketing, whenever you find yourself doing both content and style at the same time, something has gone quite wrong. For a lot of reasons, and the most obvious is that few people possess both the skills to tell a message, illustrate it, and do it well.
Content stems from the company’s tone-of-voice, taglines, product descriptions, prices, and marketing analysis of audiences. Style is design principles, typography, and a brand identity.
Can you balance the concerns of typography rules while writing the copy for an Italian sports car? Maybe, but even then, – Superman – you probably should do it in separate sessions. The switch cost of multiple concerns muddles the focus; staying on message is much more effective.
Separating content and style is not only a question of quality but one of economy. When crafting hundreds of messages across multiple formats or conducting campaigns across global business units, you do not want to reinvent the wheel for each ad. You build templates to last.
So whenever a message changes, you don’t have to worry about design, and when design changes, it’s done once and applied to all ads.
Hence, there is a time for design, configuring the right look and feel and setting up general rules for content behavior and layout. And there is a time for content, communicating with your audience, selecting offers of the day, and adjusting the message.
This is why you need auto layout through smart templates, which, once configured to your style, automatically adjust the layout for all content and apply it to messages, leaving you only with worrying about content. This puts a lot of stress on your template to adapt to all the things, and that is what we try very hard to solve.