The Challenge

As part of the Aeroplan eStore marketing team, we supported weekly promotional campaigns across a large network of retailers.

Each week we received briefs for up to 20 retailer promotions, and for each promotion, we needed to produce 6 creative banners (3 formats × 2 languages: desktop, tablet, mobile in English and French).

This meant designing up to 120 banners per week, often under short timelines and with last-minute changes.

The original process was highly manual:

• Designers recreated banners even for repeat promotions

• Simple copy updates (ex: "10% off" → "15% off") required manual edits across 6 banners since copy was embedded in images

• No central banner library existed, leading to redundant work and inconsistency

This bottleneck consumed over 20 hours of team capacity per week, straining our small creative team of 2–3 members.

My Approach

I saw an opportunity to optimize this workflow, reduce repetitive work, and free up team capacity. I introduced two key solutions:

1. Built an Internal BAU (business as usual) Banner Library

• Established a central repository of commonly used banner templates

• Enabled me to quickly source and reuse assets, reducing unnecessary design requests

2. Leveraged Figma’s Auto Layout to Systematize Banner Production

• Redesigned banners using Figma’s Auto Layout and dynamic text fields

• Enabled designers (or myself) to update two core text fields per promotion

• Auto-generated all required banner variations (EN/FR, desktop/tablet/mobile) automatically

• Dramatically reduced time required to implement copy updates and last-minute changes

  

Results

Production time reduced by over 60%

• Banner creation time dropped from ~20 hrs/week to ~7–8 hrs/week

Freed up ~30% of overall team capacity

• Enabled designers to focus on higher-value creative projects

Improved agility

• Simple promo changes could now be implemented in minutes instead of hours

• Reduced QA cycles and improved consistency across all banner formats

Better team experience

• Designers spent less time on repetitive manual updates

• Business stakeholders received faster turnaround and more consistent quality