I was creating a quick sales page and wanted to improve upon the default buy button. I use Stencil (previous AppSumo deal) for most of my everyday design needs, Adobe Spark to create quick quote templates to post on Instagram on my phone, Photoshop and Illustrator for anything big/detailed, and the free version of Canva for anything template related, since it's popular with my clients. I'm also brand new to Crello (previous AppSumo deal) and found it helpful for creating a multi-page workbook with custom fonts (not allowed on the free version of Canva).

However, despite owning so many design programs and paying Adobe every month, PixTeller intrigued me enough to try it out. I'm usually the type to just play around with something, but the animate function confused me (having done almost no animation work in my design), so I let the program sit for a few weeks - until I had time to watch the webinar and actually see how to animate things and how easy + customizable it was.

So to create my buy button - first off, due to the coding, it wasn't just a link attached to an image, so I couldn't use any website/css image effects unless I wanted to dig into the code (after several years of not coding, not something I was in the mood for). Hence, I wanted all the elements within my image, so I could upload and not worry about it. But adding a simple drop shadow to a rectangle? Apparently more complicated than it seemed.

Stencil couldn't do it - no drop shadows on shapes/icons
Crello couldn't do it - no drop shadows on shapes/icons
Adobe Spark couldn't do it - no drop shadows on shapes/icons
(Also no drop shadows on photos - was trying to do a workaround with a color overlay - nope!)

By the time, I got to Canva, I was getting a bit frustrated. I figured maybe I'd do a "fake" drop shadow with a second rectangle - since the one thing Canva did right that so many others messed up was keeping the rounded corners the same when you stretched a rounded square into a rectangle. But then I couldn't use my custom font! Oh, well, I'll just create the button and add the text in one of my other programs. And then I tried to download - nope, can't download a transparent background on a free plan.

I was pulling my hair out by this point and ready to go with the overkill of Photoshop or Illustrator. But I figured I would try out PixTeller. I hadn't tried it for this problem because I wasn't wanting to learn a new program for what should have been a 5-minute job. But I'd already wasted at least an hour by now.

It took a few minutes to figure out where everything was, but the project went beautifully! I uploaded my custom fonts, customized my drop shadow on my shape, and saved the button. It was so easy! But while I was already here - why not animate the buy button? A quick zooming effect took only a couple minutes more, and I rendered and downloaded my quite nice looking button!