8 Steps to Creating an Eye Catching Banner – Using Banner Maker Pro

Ever want to create your own banners to advertise your site, or maybe to help promote someone else’s. Thanks to the good folks over at Banner Maker Pro, you can create banners in a flash. The great thing about Banner Maker Pro is that you don’t have to be a pro to produce great looking, eye catching banners. In less than 10 minutes time, I will walk you through creating a banner for use on the internet.

For today’s exercise, we will be creating a 120×240 vertical banner. You can select any format you choose, as well as creating your own custom size banner. After you have made your size selection, it is time to move over to the background tab.

On the background tab, you are able to do something as simple as a plain color, select a background image, or select a gradient option. I am going to select a background image from one of the many that come standard with Banner Maker Pro. The shape options on the right allow you specify how your banner is displayed. The rounded rect option shows me nice smooth rounded corners. Don’t let the green background color bother you at this point. Once we get near the end of our exercise, you will be able to change that color. That is the default transparent color. Let’s go ahead and move on to the next step.

Depending on the shape option you selected on the last page, you may want to consider not placing any bevels or borders on your banner. The only option that works well with placing edges and bevels is the rectangle shape. So for our exercise, we will leave the defaults in place. They should be Bevel Inner = none, Bevel Outer = none; Border = none. Please feel free to play around with the different options.

When you are ready, we can move over to the ‘Shapes’ tab. Shapes allow you to add additional items to your banner. I am going to add several stars to mine to give the cityscape a nice clear night. Every time you click the ‘New Shape’ button, you can add a new shape. Play around with different sizes along with different shadows, borders, and gradients. Each option you change makes the shape look a little different. For mine, I created several stars that started out with the shape color being white. But after adding some different shadow settings and gradients to each one, I ended up with all my stars being slightly different. Finally, I added a eclipse shape to put in as the moon. You can also utilize the up, down, left, and right buttons to assist with moving your images around on the page. The option to drag them is also available, but if you are looking for pinpoint accuracy, I would suggest you drag the shape close to where you want it and then use the buttons for the precision you want.

Let’s go one over to the image tab. Though for our purposes, we will not add any images, this option will allow you to put in your own images. It might be a logo you have that you want, or may just an image that you need to show. Whatever your reasons, this is a powerful way to personalize your banner. If you have not done much work with images, you may not be aware that if you resize the image, the ‘Keep Aspect Ratio’ is generally a good option to select. This helps with keeping the image from getting stretched out of shape as it moves the width and height accordingly. Using the ‘Transparency’ options allows you to blend in your image with the background more effectively.

The next step is to add any text you may want. We start on the Text tab and add any text we want on our banner. Then we can move over to the Text+ tab and give it some real ‘BANG’. I am going to add the text ‘Joe’s Banner’ to mine. For my font, I fancy using Verdana for the display. I am also going to make the font color white since my background is fairly dark. Then I am going to move over to the Text+ tab and give my text a black border that has a width of 1. And I will be using a gradient on it starting with blue and ending in white. This will give me the effect that I am looking for. Once you have completed adding any text you want, we can move over to the ‘Angles’ tab.

Angles allow you to add additional text to your banner. What is different is that you can put your text at angles to help draw attention, or you can add some radius to it. It is my suggestion to you that you play around with these options and pick what is right for you. I have added the phrase, ‘The City at Nite’. The only option that I added was the shadow 3D effect.

We are finally ready to save our banner and get a final look at it. If you remember back, I told you not to worry about the green background color if you selected any shape rather than the rectangle. Here is the tab where you can make those changes. I like to change mine to white, but you don’t have to change it at all.

That brings us to the end of our exercise. You have now walked through the basics of creating a banner in Banner Maker Pro. All you need to do is save your banner. We didn’t discuss the animation list, as it is beyond the scope of this lesson. Once you are comfortable making a few banners, then you can move on to creating ones that are animated.