Design 5 Tools to Step Up Your Banner Game Marissa Norton Design 5 mins read August 31, 2018 » Blog » 5 Tools to Step Up Your Banner Game Table of Contents 1. Quick N’ Easy Designing: Canva 2. Ultimate Inspo: AdEspresso 3. For The Designer: Sketch App Resources 4. Easy Peasy Image Optimizations: Landscape 5. Be Proactive: Facebook Grid Tool Banner Blindness Be Gone If you’re creating ads for display networks, you’ll need various dimensions and formats, an eye-catching design, and a working knowledge of dos and don’ts. 1. Quick N’ Easy Designing: Canva For those who aren’t proficient in Photoshop, Sketch, or other designing software, Canva is a great and easy alternative that allows users to create designs for tons of use cases – including banner ads. You can choose from templates or start from scratch and, for the most part, you can use Canva for free. Their paid version is also available and allows you to use more design and export options. 2. Ultimate Inspo: AdEspresso Not only is this site great to check out cool creative, it’s a great research tool to help you with message-matching, industry trends and how different brands are tackling similar messaging. You can filter banner ads by placement (desktop or right column), industry, objective and attributes, along with searching for specific subjects so you can think of different approaches to copy, design, placement and more! 3. For The Designer: Sketch App Resources If you’re on a tight budget, have limited time or like to avoid spending hours looking up specs that are easily accessible for free, then Sketch App Resources is for you. There are over 3000 sketch files available for free downloads created by designers, for designers. Use them for easy standardized banner ad templates and you can easily apply your designs to the containers without needing to look up various dimensions. Our favs: Facebook Ad Optimizations Google Ad Sizes Templates for Social Media Marketing For our Photoshop homies, here’s a link to Spinfluence’s free templates 4. Easy Peasy Image Optimizations: Landscape Have you ever spent hours editing and resizing your social imagery? You can now rest easy knowing you will NEVER have to do that again thanks to Landscape. Landscape is a simple and effective tool from Sprout Social that allows you to upload an image and select which sizes, channels and locations you need optimizations for. In one simply drag ‘n drop upload, you can create images for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more! These include organic imagery as well as dimensions frequently used for ads or boosted/sponsored posts on social. 5. Be Proactive: Facebook Grid Tool Facebook only allows advertisers to have 20% text on their ads to avoid feeds looking spammy (yeah, it can be super frustrating). This can often be even more problematic if there’s text in the image you’re using, like “STOP” on a stop sign, or words on a t-shirt for sale. Facebook does, however, provide a handy tool to test your ads before going knee deep or scheduling. Once you’ve finished a quick mockup, run it through the tool to make sure you’re on the right track. When you’ve confirmed you’re good to go, you can optimize for other across Facebook dimensions. Source: Instapage The 20% rule is finicky and you can easily work your way around it – check out this blog post from Jon Loomer for advanced tricks. Banner Blindness Be Gone Those are just a few of our favs to fight banner blindness and create stunning assets. Did we miss any of yours? Share This Article
The Organizations Making Pride Real All Year Round Elizabeth Holloway Campaigning 8 mins read June 15, 2026
Research That Sits on a Shelf Fails the Communities It Studied Elizabeth Holloway Strategy 6 mins read June 8, 2026
How to Turn Your Annual Report Into a Full Year of Social Media Content Marissa Norton Social Media 7 mins read May 25, 2026