RelayThat

Running​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌ Design at Scale: My Truly Honest RelayThat Review Any digital marketer or social media manager is painfully familiar with the never-ending "creative grind" syndrome. Designing a lovely Pinterest pin only for you to be hit by the realization that you need the very same design in a Facebook cover, an Instagram story, a LinkedIn post, and a Google display ad. After thoroughly resizing, changing, and re-arranging every single detail manually, the time you spent is enough to take away the whole afternoon. I decided that there is no need to torture myself any longer and focused my attention on RelayThat . It has been marketed as the 'anti-Canva', a software that mainly by automation and not manual drag-and-drop. My honest opinion about this platform, whether it is the ultimate productivity hack or just another design tool, is after I used it for a multi-channel campaign management. What stuff is RelayThat comprised of? RelayThat is a platform integrating automation for 'Brand Management'. As opposed to the common graphic design software with which you start with a blank canvas and gradually move elements around one-by-one, a rules-based engine is what comes into play in RelayThat. You provide the platform with your brand arsenal - logo, color scheme, fonts, and pictures - and it just instantly creates thousands of layout variations for the different sizes of social media and ads. It’s intended to cut off the 'busy work' of design so you can concentrate on the strategy. The Workflow: The "Magic" of Smart Layouts The workflow of RelayThat is very different from anything else I've ever used that is simply detailed in the following points:

1. The Asset Upload First of all, you make a "Project". You upload your brand’s logo (preferably without a background), then select your main and secondary colors and choose the fonts. You can upload a collection of "lifestyle" photos or take from their stock library, which is built-in.
2. The One-Click Transformation Your assets will bring about one-click transformation to the layouts. The right side of your computer will display the sidebar where hundreds of "Smart Layouts" reside. The moment you choose each one, the design will be instantly freshened up by RelayThat. Editing the headline in one layout will change it automatically in all the others.
3. Automatic Resizing Come to think, there is this one feature that totally saved my mental health. When you’ve decided on the layout, you can move the "Workspace" from one post to another, e.g., square from Instagram to horizontal thumbnail from YouTube, or vertical pin from Pinterest. The font's sizes and the images' positions are adjusted flawlessly and in an instant by the AI to cater to the new measurements. Main Features to Focus on Magic Import: If you want, you can just paste the link of your current website and let RelayThat "scrape" the brand colors, logos, and images to set up your workspace without delay. It’s a tremendous head start. The "Headlines" Tool: The platform has high-performing headline templates that cater to different industries, just in case you can’t come up with any. Color Palette Suggestions: The tool offers professional palettes for brands that look dull. Such palettes ensure high contrast and easy legibility. Mass Download: When you finally approve the project, just select everything you want, and there will be a zip file ready for download straight away.

The User Experience: Function Over Flair RelayThat didn’t exactly focus on making the UI as good-looking as Canva or VistaCreate. Instead, it looks more like a practical utility. What’s even better is, since you don’t have the liberty to move elements 'pixel by pixel', you couldn’t, in that way, spoil alignment. Thus, it kind of hands over the 'brand consistency' to you, and for those teams of content creators who are more than one person, this really is a big plus. What I Loved: The good points Consistency is SOS: Since the AI always keeps the rules in line with your brand, the problem of picking off-brand colors or fonts won't miraculously occur. Speed This one tool gave me the ability to take the social media content of 3 different platforms for an entire week all in 20 minutes. No Design Skill is Needed: Since the ones doing the 'Smart Layouts' balance the composition and leave the white space for you, you don’t have to have an artistic eye. Asset Management: If you are managing multiple clients, this is your thing. It’s like brand workspaces switching is just a matter of seconds.

The Reality Check: The bad points Limited Creative Freedom: Imagine that you have to put a star under a specific photo by exactly 3 millimeters to the left. It’s a no from the tool. You are allowed to work only within the given layouts. Learning Curve: There is a bit of a struggle when it is said you have to hand over control of the layouts to the automatic side of the tool. However, you just need to give it a short try, and the change in your mindset will be automatic.

The Verdict: Who is RelayThat For? RelayThat is a perfect match for such groups as creative agencies, affiliate marketers, and small business owners who usually have to deal with a flurry of content and haven’t got a full-time designer. In case you are an artist who demands full control over each brushstroke, the tool will irritate you. However, for business people who want maximum output with minimum effort , it is just a different ball game altogether. It escorts 'manual labor' out of the design and turns it into an orderly, quasi-automatic ​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌process.