Old-school way of designing posters is going to places like Upwork or Fiverr and hiring a graphic designer to make posters for your business.
They take their time making the thing, then deliver it to you for review. If you like it, job well done. If it’s not so great, you communicate back and forth with the designer revising it until it looks “okay”.
When you want just one poster, this way is fine but it’s frustratingly inefficient when you need a lot of posters.
And for consistent posting on social media platforms, you need lots and lots of posters for the platform to start suggesting your content to people organically. Big brick-and-mortar companies hire in-house designers for this. But if you like running big things lean like me, saving time and money, automation is the way. Here’s how it’s done.
Automating Design & Publishing
Let’s learn through an example. Say we run a Shopify store that sells wines. We have a bunch of wines in our physical store and also we take orders through the online store and ship the stuff to whoever wants it.
We run ads but that’s not sustainable long-term, so we need to build a solid social media presence that will get people not only to buy from us but to know us, love us, and become fans. That’s why we have to create a lot of content. Content to evangelize every wine we have.
We’ll create visuals(posters) for each wine bottle and post 12 different posters per day for an entire year (the automation will be on a loop). We can post on Facebook, X, Pinterest, or Instagram. For demonstration purposes, we’ll just post on Facebook.
We’ll use the cheapest and easiest but efficient way possible to accomplish this. The automation platform we’ll use is Make.com( it’s no-code and freakin easy).
Step 1
Create a template poster in Photoshop. I’m just used to Photoshop but you can use any graphic design application you want. Just make sure the application can let you export PNG images(with a transparent background).
Step 2
Export the elements of your poster, layer by layer, as PNG image files. The automation will reassemble all the elements back into the poster but in a customizable way. Don’t export the text layers, we want those to be variables we can change as the automation runs.
Step 3
The elements to customize in this particular poster template is the wine bottle, the name of the wine, and the catchphrase. So you want to make as many wine bottle image elements for the automation. Save them as PNG transparent images. On a real project, these would be the products that you sell or that your client sells.
Step 4
We need to host those wine bottle images somewhere online so that the automation will not depend on our local machine. For image hosting, there are lots of options but I use Flickr. It’s free for the first 1000 images. Upload the images and extract the image URL of each image.
Step 5
Create a Google Sheet and write all the details about each wine (price, catchphrase, name, etc). For each wine, there should be a column for images. You add each image link to their respective row in that column. (Side note: If you need more complex data manipulation, Airtable is a better bet than Google Sheets)
Step 6
Open a new scenario in Make, search for the Google Sheets module, connect your Google Drive account, and select the Search rows module. [If you have no idea how to use make.com, you can start by enrolling in their free academy here]
We want to create a loop that parses information into the automation using Google Sheets modules. The loop will keep rotating the same data. Here’s a combination of Google Sheets modules in Make that keeps rotating the same data.
For each run, this combination pulls in a row topping the list in the Google sheet, deletes that row in the Google sheet, and then adds it back but at the bottom of the list. That’s the looping effect we want. So no new data will be needed for the automation to keep running forever.
Step 7
For each row that is pulled in, we want to create a poster using the information from that row. Search for the Generatebanners module in Make and append it to your scenario like so. Again here, there are lots of options but I just like Generatebanners.
Generatebanners is a web app that assembles image elements, combines them(reassemble our poster template to look like it looked in Photoshop), and poops out posters through an API endpoint. Make has already done the heavy lifting of bundling API endpoints so all we do is attach the module to our automation.
Step 8
Go to generatebanners.com, make an account or sign in, and recreate the template poster with the image elements you exported earlier. Make it look exactly like the one you made in Photoshop. Save the template and exit. Copy the template ID.
Step 9
Open your Make scenario, click the generatebanners module, paste the template ID, and let it load. All the design elements you added in Generatebanners will appear as variable inputs you can populate with image or text data. We’ll get that data from the Google Sheets. We can change the wine bottle image, name, and catchphrase, so we map that on the generatebanners module.
Step 10
As far as creating posters is concerned, you’re done, every time that automation runs it’ll produce a different poster. It’ll exhaust all the rows of data in your Google sheet and start all over again. But we have to publish this somewhere right? Let’s publish on a platform that is the easiest to hook to our automation in Make: Facebook. (you’ll need a Facebook page for this)
Step 11
Append the Facebook pages module to the generatebanners module, link your Facebook account, choose your Facebook page, and map the image from generatebanners on the fb module. The copy for the Facebook post can be mapped from the Google Sheets modules. Click ok. You’re done.
Step 12
You can schedule the automation to run as many times per day as you want. Set it to run after every 2 hours, that’s 12 posters per day, every day. There is no strict rule as to how many times you can post per day, you literally can post the heaven out of this. Just do what is giving you the best results.
Getting more creative
That was the basic procedure to show you the ropes, but you can get crazy creative with this. Actually, I recommend getting crazy because you don’t want your audience or fans to figure out that you’re not doing this manually. People engage more when they feel like they’re responding to a real person, not a bot/automation.
The best way to get crazy is by using AI and having a lot of data to play with. You can incorporate an AI assistant to write unique copy every time the automation runs. Depending on the platform you’re publishing on(e.g. Pinterest), you might have to write titles and descriptions for a single post. An AI assistant can do just that, including relevant hashtags or writing the stuff in different languages if you’re serving a multilingual audience.
Create different template designs and in each template, you can use AI models like Dall-E 3 to create background images for each design. You can write the prompts yourself or you can use another AI assistant to write the prompts as the automation runs. Here’s an example of an automation for a client that decided to go crazy.
This demo was just one use case but this kind of AI-powered automation can be applied to different kinds of applications in a business. You can generate reports this way, or invoices or receipts or memes…anything. The output can be an image or an image with text, a Word document, or a PDF file. If you have a business that is service-based, you can have something like this generating leads. If you want something like this built for your business, get started here. Peace out✌.
