REVIEW: Banner Maker Pro

It was a big relief when I hit this screen. I'd thought that there might just be the 'dreaded' 468 x 60 standard banner size only. But that wasn't the case. As you can see from the screen shot, there's a plethora of sizes to choose from - OR you can simply add your own dimensions in at the base (recommended). So this is a pretty straight forward screen. It's a case of making a new document and then setting up the size. 'Nuff said.

Picking a background

Another concern I had about this software was just how customizable the ad graphics would be. One of the most important questions being: could you import your own images? This is the screen where you set the background image. There's a long list of pre-defined background images which you can choose from at this stage. Most of them are either pretty shabby or just have that 'made by the banner tool' type look to them. I can't imagine that they'd be much use to most designers. What saves this section's face big time is that you can import your own image, OR use a nice built-in gradient editor. You can choose any color and also set the smoothness of the gradient with the number of colors it should use.

Adding a border

This is one feature that you might want to skip. The borders were not the glamourous 3D variety that some of Photoshop's filters can generate, and software like this should have had a better set of border generators. At best, you're going to get a 2 tone border which, well... looks like it was made in a banner maker tool - IN 1995! This section is best left alone in all honesty.

Adding shapes

This is the area where you can add simple basic geometric shapes such as stars, boxes, and ellipses. You can set their color, border, shadow and many other aspects. This area is let down badly by the lack of an anti-alias on the graphics you can add. (This means that whatever you add will likely have a jagged pixel edge to it). This is sort of strange because the text itself is fully anti-aliased and looks very professional. This should have been extended to these shapes also. Here's an example of some shapes I added:

They look kind of OK but very dated. Again, they just look 'generated'.

Adding images

It's great that you can add images, but there's some serious short-comings here too. The major gripe was that the image editing facilities were pretty primitive. You've only got the ability to edit the width and height (although the maintain aspect ratio was pretty useful). The ability to set the image's alpha would have been especially welcome (make it transparent). But this has been missed out. There is however a good JPEG compression slider on the SAVE screen, complete with a power preview. Whether you're saving GIFs or JPEGs - there should be everything you need right here.

Adding text

A lot more thought has gone into this area. There's a nice font selection box where you can see each font style actually listed. The second text screen:

...gives a great level of control over how the text looks. There's a good gradient maker, a more than decent shadow, and even the ability to add texture to the text among other things. The shadow designer is nothing short of flawless. The shadows are 'transparent' and have more options than you can shake a stick at. The results are fast and impressive:

The Angles screen

This screen shouldn't be there at all. It lets you add text which is not anti-aliased and it just looks plain awful. Dated and rough - should either be refined or removed completely from the software.

Animation...

The last major area of the software is it's animation capabilities. This is broken down into two major areas:

One Step Animation:

This area lets you ad some eye-popping animation effects to your images. But the major drawback is that adding these effects are realistically going to make most GIFs unusable. I made one ad graphic and, after saving it, saw that the size was up to around 400kb!!! I mean if you want to go for animation of this sort (special effects and so on...) go for a Flash tool like Swish. This beastie isn't cut out to deal with lots of complex animation.

Frame By Frame Animation: