The full story
Where they were stuck
Deals are what bring customers through the door, so they show up everywhere: on the TVs above the counter, on vertical screens by the entrance, in the weekly email, on the website and online menus, on marketplace listings and on printed sheets at the register.
Every one of those spots needs its own size. That meant eight versions of the same information, rebuilt from scratch every single week, and checked over and over because one wrong price on a TV screen is a real problem at the till.
It was steady, careful work, and it took one designer the entire week. Nothing about it was creative. It was copying the same deals into different boxes.
The shift in thinking
The deals change every week. The design doesn't. Same layout, same fonts, same colours, same category icons. Only the brand, the discount and the dates move.
Once you see it that way, a deal card stops being a design job and becomes a data job. Fill in the data, and the design can follow on its own.
What actually happens
Enter. Someone on the team types in the week's deals, split into weekday, weekend and standing offers, with the brand, the discount and the product category. If the deals already live in a spreadsheet, they import it in one go.
Check. A live preview shows every card as it will look. This is the one step that stays human: a quick read to make sure every price and date is right.
Generate. One click produces every format at once. Layout, spacing, category icons, the footer line and the date range all fall into place automatically.
Deliver. The finished files land in the shared Drive folders each channel already pulls from, so the stores, the email and the website team just pick them up.
Every format, from one input
- In-store TVs, landscape and full vertical
- Online menu banners, standard and wide
- Email, as one tall card ready to drop in
- Print, landscape and portrait sheets for the stores
- Marketplace listings, sized for third-party apps
Built with AI, not a development team
There was no software project behind this, no agency and no developer. The tool was built with AI in plain conversation: describing the cards, the formats and the rules, then testing and adjusting until the output matched what the designer used to make by hand.
It runs in a normal web browser, so anyone on the team can use it without installing anything.
What used to take a designer all week now takes one input, one check and one click.
What it changed
The weekly deal cards still go out on time, in every format, and with fewer mistakes, because the information is entered once instead of eight times.
The bigger win is the person. A full-time designer is no longer stuck resizing. That time now goes into brand work: campaigns, new store materials and the creative projects that used to wait.
What to take from this
Look for the work that looks like design but is really data: the same layout filled with new information every week. Price lists, menus, schedules, event posters, product sheets. That is often where a small custom tool pays for itself fastest, and where your best people are quietly losing their week.