PixTeller is an online image editor and animation maker, which makes it simple for non-designers and non-animators to create graphic assets for their web pages and social media. It’s a huge boon, as it takes all the work out of it, and all you have to do is come up with the words. Simple, right? In this article we’re taking a look at PixTeller to find out if it can possibly be that easy to make wonderful graphic content.
Graphics and Animation by the Yard
Using the tools on PixTeller, you can create graphic assets for marketers, bloggers or website owners. Or just users who want to make designs for personal or business use such as posters, animated GIFs, logos, photo collages, memes, banners, invitations, flyers, and video thumbnails. While you CAN create an image from scratch, you don’t have to, as PixTeller has pre-designed templates to give you a leg up. The tools PixTeller provides give you access to over 100,000 templates and over 1,500,000 photos, ready to be shaped to fit your brand. Basically, what you do is choose a template, adjust the parameters to your needs and then download the finished artwork or animation for use on your social media or website.
Design You Can Use
Creating with PixTeller is very quick and easy. The cool part about PixTeller is that although it has a great many templates, you can design from scratch as well. Although the templates are excellent and have lots of charm, you can literally take them apart completely. So you can be as flexible as you like with the result you’re going for. There are so many templates and styles that it’s almost impossible to list them all without running a long boring list past your eyes, but I’ll show a couple of prime examples. Say for example you liked this Edison quote template for a 851×315 Facebook-size cover image, but you want to change the background picture. The format of the template is the right size for Facebook, and the layout of the text is great, but would it work for another quote? Click the picture, which takes you to the editor. Then select the picture, and click Replace Picture on the menu on the left. Choose a new picture from the selections. Try to choose something that has some empty space to accommodate the text. Apply a filter to the picture to make it black and white. Select the picture if it’s not already selected, and choose Filters & Effects from the left menu. Choose a nice b/w filter. Finally, select the text and the name and cut and paste a new quote and name into the text edit box on the menu on the left. Having done all that, you may still also need to add a drop shadow to make the text more readable against the picture. Select the text, and under the Text section on the left, select Filters to adjust the drop shadow so it isn’t blurred, has 100% opacity and is +2 pixels in the x axis and +2 pixels in the Y axis to get a shadow that’s out to the right and dropped down. You can click the big inviting orange Save Image button and download it for use on Facebook. A cute trick you can employ to use this graphic on your Twitter cover image as well is to click the Smart Resize button. This makes the graphic size up to Twitter’s bigger 1500×500 size but without stretching or gapping. It smoothly resizes the assets to fit the bigger size. That’s a very neat and time-saving trick, allowing you to spin out your carefully constructed graphic into many other formats easily and quickly. What if you wanted to add some animation to this banner? It’s very simple: Just click the big friendly Animate button, move the cursor on the timeline at the bottom to another frame number, then move the element (text or shape) to another location, and it’s done. The asset will now move smoothly from the start position to the place you put it through the course of the animation. There’s even very professional looking ease-in-and-out effects on a couple of buttons so you can make the abrupt transitions of movement more soft and expensive-looking. The Save button changes to a Render & Save button in Animate mode. You can resize and move any of the elements in the templates and truly make them your own, or you can leave them alone and just change the text or colour to suit your campaign or fancy. It’s that flexibility which makes PixTeller a very good option for graphic asset generation.
Conclusion
I really like PixTeller. The blend of ready-to-go graphics plus total freedom to edit means you will definitely get what you need no matter your level of design skill or budget. I love the simplicity and cleanliness of the interface, and although it’s very stripped down, what you can do with it is potentially very powerful. I’ve just scratched the surface with some basics here, but there’s a lot more to it. Head on over to the site and check it out for yourself. PixTeller is available to try, but if you want to get full use out of it you’ll have to purchase a license. Pricing is very reasonable for access to all the templates, $7 a month for Pro which offers you the still graphics options and $12 a month for Diamond which enables all the animation tools. If you have any questions about graphics and animation products please let us know in the comments below.
