You’ve seen this movie before. You open a new tool, and the interface feels familiar. A toolbar on the left, layers on the right, a canvas in the middle. You draw some boxes, drop in a hero image, finesse the kerning on a headline. At a glance, tools like Viewst, Figma, and Canva could be cousins from the same software family.

But the moment you get down to real, deadline-driven production work, you feel the difference in their DNA. It’s like the difference between a concept car and a Formula 1 race car. They both have wheels and an engine, but they are engineered for fundamentally different jobs.

Figma and Canva are brilliant visual design and collaboration hubs. They are your sandbox, your mood board, your presentation builder. They’re perfect for composing brand systems, exploring campaign concepts, and getting stakeholder buy-in on static comps.

Viewst is a production powerhouse. It’s engineered from the ground up to do one thing exceptionally well: build, animate, and ship high-volume HTML ad campaigns at scale. And from that single, robust HTML source, you can derive every other format you need, banners, GIFs, MP4s, static images, without breaking a sweat.

That laser focus on production changes everything about how the tool feels, what it excels at, and where it fits in your workflow.

Pixels vs. HTML: the difference between a picture of an ad and the ad itself

Most graphic editors, even the vector-based ones, are fundamentally about painting pixels. They give you a canvas, and your job is to create a beautiful, static representation of your idea. The final render you’re tweaking is, for all intents and purposes, a picture.

Viewst flips the script. When you drag a box or set a keyframe, you aren't painting on a canvas; you're writing clean HTML and CSS in real-time. You are directly manipulating the DOM. Think of it this way: you’re not designing a picture of the ad; you're building the live, functional ad itself.

Why this is a game-changer for production designers:

• One source of truth, many outputs. You’re working in the native language of the web. This makes it trivial to export production-ready HTML that ad platforms love. But because the foundation is so solid, we can also render that same project as a pixel-perfect GIF, a crisp MP4, or a high-res JPG/PNG. No more rebuilding the same creative in three different apps.

• Kill the design-to-dev handoff. The endless cycle of "design here, then have a developer rebuild it as HTML over there" is dead. The subtle easing curve you perfected, the precise brand color you specified, the typographic hierarchy you established, it’s all preserved. Your creative is born production-ready. What you design is what ships.

• Animation that actually ships. The animations you build in Viewst aren’t a prototype or a demo video. They are the actual CSS and JavaScript animations that will run in the browser, inside the final ad unit. You're not creating a proof-of-concept; you're choreographing the final performance.

Artboard-first, not infinite canvas

Figma’s infinite canvas is a masterpiece of creative exploration. It’s a boundless digital whiteboard, perfect for brainstorming, user flows, and system mapping.

But production isn't about infinite exploration. It’s about finite constraints. It’s about the 728×90 leaderboard, the 300×250 MPU, and the 160×600 skyscraper. It’s about file weight budgets, ad server specs, and tight deadlines.

Viewst centers your entire workflow on the artboard: the exact deliverable size you’re shipping. This deliberate constraint makes practical production tasks feel completely natural:

• Designing for the matrix: instantly see how your concept holds up across a dozen different ad dimensions, side-by-side.

• Budgeting every kilobyte: the file weight checker is always visible, so you know instantly if that gorgeous-but-heavy asset is going to get your ad rejected by Google Ads.

• Exporting what they need: Deliver formats and specs that an ad server actually understands, without any guesswork or post-export hacking.

Speed at scale: the magic of syncing across sizes

In the real world of campaign creative, you rarely ship just one banner. You ship a set. And that’s where the soul-crushing, mind-numbing repetition usually kicks in. The client wants a tiny copy tweak... and now you have to open 15 files and copy-paste-nudge-align it 15 times.

Viewst treats an entire set of ad sizes as a linked, intelligent family.

• Tweak a headline in your main artboard → it cascades through your entire ad set in real-time.

• Adjust an easing curve on an animation → the motion updates perfectly across all sizes.

• Swap out a product shot for a new promotion → every single artboard keeps in sync.

This is the difference between a tedious afternoon of mechanical tweaks and a five-minute, one-and-done update. It’s not just a time-saver; it’s a sanity-saver.

From prototype motion to production-ready animation

We’ve all been in the "prototype trap." You design a slick, beautiful animation in Figma or After Effects. The client falls in love with it. Then you hand it off, and the developer tells you it's impossible to build in HTML5 under the 150kb limit.

Viewst’s animator is built for the realities of ad platforms. Your motion is:

• Flawlessly on-brand: Your keyframes, timing, and easing are perfectly consistent across every single ad size, not just "eyeballed" to look similar.

• Natively exportable: The core output is clean HTML, but you can also export that same bulletproof animation as a GIF or MP4 for social or email campaigns.

• Built for performance: We handle the technical complexities like polite loading, clickTag implementation, and file size optimization so your ads load fast and track correctly.

A quick word on performance

You might hear a lot about WebAssembly (Wasm) and GPU-accelerated canvases. That tech is incredible for tools that are in a race to be the world's fastest digital paintbrush. They are optimizing for a designer pushing pixels in real-time.

Viewst isn't in that race. Our race is to help you ship a campaign faster. By editing directly in the ad's native language (HTML/CSS), we sidestep the entire "translate this beautiful picture into code" step. This keeps your design lightweight and as close as possible to what actually runs in your audience’s browser.

How Viewst fits into your workflow

We’re not here to replace your favorite tools. We’re here to supercharge your production process.

1. Explore in Figma/Adobe. This is your sandbox. Sketch, ideate, dream, diverge. Get your core brand look and feel approved.

2. Produce in Viewst. This is your factory floor. Import your approved assets, build the final creative set, animate with precision, sync changes across all sizes, and export every format you need from one place.

3. Iterate without pain. Last-minute CTA change from the marketing team? New seasonal color palette? Localized pricing for a different region? Make the edit once in Viewst; let the sync engine handle the rest.

Honest trade-offs

Let's be real: HTML isn't as freeform as a Photoshop canvas. You can't just grab a smudge tool and blur two elements together. The structure of code requires a more disciplined approach. But that trade-off for "freeform painting" gets you something far more valuable in production: power, consistency, and automation. We do the heavy lifting of handling browser quirks and ad server demands so you can focus on the creative.

The bottom line

If your job is to turn beautiful concepts into campaign-ready, multi-format ad sets that perform in the wild, Viewst is built for you. It’s the production engine that bolts onto your existing design process.

Stop just designing ads. Start building them.