Flexative not all it's made out to be
I've heard a lot about Flexative in the past 6 months or so. The concept is that you prepare one banner size on their online system, using one background image, one cta, typing the copy once, etc, and then Flexative handles the remaining sizes automatically. It's being pushed as a very fast way to get out a campaign to as many different platforms as possible.
But I can't buy into it. I come from a world of animation, and making things look as beautiful as possible to draw in viewers. This system has so many limitations that it physically hurts me trying to make it look nice. Want to anything more than a pre-packaged fade-in or slide-in, it's out of the question. You can't even change the colour of the legal mice type from size to size to make it more legible based on what the background crop is.
Seems like such a fast-food way of doing banners, with no regard for quality or pride of workmanship.
Tween Engines
Back in the Flash days, there seemed to be a lot of popular tween engines. TweenLite, GTween, Tweener, FuseKit... all of which were used regularly. It wasn't a surprise if you saw a project using one. But now, it's Greensock (TweenLite) or JQuery. Any other is strange. At least for banners. Im sure that in the bigger scheme of things, nothing is a surprise. But seeing as how Im a banner developer, thats the realm Im talking about.
Does anyone have another low weight tween engine that is good in banners that we should make a regular thing?
Google Creative Partner Day Presentation Complete!
Presentation at Google's Toronto Head Office went well yesterday. I hope everyone there got inspired with some great stuff they can do with Dynamic banners, or at least learned more about what they are capable of. Although my part of the presentation was small, it was good to be involved with a great event, and an honour to be invited to speak.
Finally updated my Guide to Banner Dev for PMs and Designers
The guide I wrote for PMs and Designers to understand the technical aspect of Banner dev has finally been updated to include HTML5 banners instead of the now outdated Flash banners. Hope it helps!
Google Conference
Looks like I have been penciled in to present at the upcoming Google conference in Toronto to discuss Advanced Dynamic banners. Have to try to find some presentable work I've done in that area to show. That might actually be a challenge... Most of those kinds of banners Im not allowed to show because of NDAs for some reason. Hoping I can find something.
Live Text vs Images
I know the argument for live fonts in banners. Easier to make client changes. Less file size. Crisp readabilty.
But unless specifically told to do so, I will never use live fonts for the following reasons:
1) Images are much faster to code. Live fonts require a while bunch of CSS to get it looking correct. Imagine a price point, with a small $, different size dollars and cents, and a few dividing lines for good measure. Not difficult CSS, but takes way longer that just saving an image in Photoshop. Just set up an action in Photoshop to turn a layer or selection into a transparent PNG, and thats your image. And as long as you keep the PSD, it's easy to make changes. The one thing I'll give live fonts in this area is its easier for a new developer to take over as you don't need to worry about passing along the PSD as well.
2) Images are much easier to QA. An image is an image in every modern browser and platform. No way can you say the same thing about live fonts. It will looks slightly different all over the place.
3) Unless you have a web font licensed, you will need to resort to Google fonts, or something else not quite what the AD wanted. And even if you do have a proper font to upload with the zip, it will never look exactly the same as the PSD. Sometimes very close, but never exact. And the AD worked hard at all those kerning and letting settings which will be tossed.
4) Custom fonts can be huge, thus offsetting the file size you saved from using fonts instead of images. Maybe even putting you over the file size limit. And you will usually have to load it from the cloud, which is still a grey area for many ad servers.
5) Using tinypng.com with retina sized PNGs is surprisingly efficient for file size and quality. Thus quality with images will not be compromised.
Overall, the thing about banners is that they are temporary venues for advertising. They will typically be handled by one dev only, and only be around for a limited time. There is no need for easy editing or ease of transfer. File size, image quality, and speed of development are the three key aspects. File size/quality is debatable depending on the design and fonts, but usually can be done with images no problem considering what banners are usually designed like. But speed of development, there is no argument at all. Images are way easier. And will always get you exactly what the AD (and client) is expecting without having to resort to "Well, it's HTML text so it will look a bit different than the PDF."
Banner time of year
Every year I seem to think I have the timing of the busy banner season hammered down, and every year it throws me off. It seems logical that November would be the busy season, with clients all preparing for the holidays. Then I would assume December would tail off as everything is already done and prepared and ready for trafficking. 2014 was like that. But this year November was the same as October which was the same as December. 2013 had a dead November, and a killer December.
I guess for freelancers it's not so much about time of year, but more on the particular clients you are working with that year, and their overflow.
TinyPNG
How is it that Tinypng.com compresses PNGs so much better than any other desktop based image compressor? Always thought ImageOptim was enough, but no. Always use TinyPNG.com as well.
SVG Exporting
Since SVGs don't animate well in older browsers (Specifically zooming), I've avoided using them in banners for a while, opting instead for retina sized PNGs. But Im warming up to them. Most clients are caring less and less about IE9, and I've found a few really good tools.
The first is something with Photoshop CC that I only recently discovered. It allows you to export SVGs from text layers without having to do any extra steps (except for converting to shape layers). Just turn on File>Generate>Image Assets. Then rename each layer xxxx.svg, and without any extra steps, wherever you have saved the PSD, a new folder will appear with a file for any layer named with a .svg extension. Explained much better here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=206&v=6TRz-gNdQFg
Also, I found a really good tool for compression SVGs. Give it a go here: https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/
Adobe Animate
Edge is gone. Flash is back. Sort of. In IDE form. Same interface, and a decent export to HTML5. Still a massive javascript library download in the background though as with other WYSIWYG editors, and media companies never seem to know if that is allowed with the buy or not. DCM encourages it, but clients don't like to take the chance. So until that's sorted, it's going to be a struggle to figure out on each project if it's allowed or not.
In other words, it's going to be hand coding unless some sort of nasty animation is required. Then it's worth the fight to figure out if it can be used or not.