Designers, you know the “state of play”. As Paula Scher once said, “You have to be in a state of play to design. If you’re not in a state of play, you can’t make anything.” Even if you aren’t familiar with the iconic Paula Scher, you know this feeling. When the team’s sticky notes are flying onto that whiteboard, when the headline line-breaks are just right on that 24th lockup version, or when the animation hits that exact pacing in your mind’s eye, you’ve felt that “state of play”.
In many ways, this is the golden age of design. With AI, lightweight 3D rendering, and automation helping to offload repetitive work, designers can go further and faster. But in advertising, creative momentum is often lost to ad production work that pulls teams out of that state of play.
Modular ad design brings creative vision to life at scale, not just for production designers, but also for marketers and teams without design backgrounds who need to adapt ads while staying on brand. It also ensures creative is structured, governed, and ready to perform across channels, markets, and media strategies.
Rigid creative direction slows your team down
So, what do you actually spend your time doing? If you’re stuck tweaking CTAs across endless specs, rendering in every possible length, or revising copy at the 11th hour, then you’re not doing what you were hired to do. You’re managing ad production friction, not designing ad creatives.
But don’t worry, there are ways to win back your time. By applying modular ad design early and using ad design tools with integrated AI, creative teams can avoid last-minute fixes and endless approvals. Hit that deadline with some time to spare, so you can get back to designing ad creatives instead of rebuilding them.
What often slows things down is getting stuck with a fixed creative direction and incomplete guidance. Maybe it’s a few static sizes as reference, or (even worse) a single 30s TV spot meant to extend into an entire social and display campaign. These fixed references offer little insight into how this singular design–its layout, language, animation, content, timing, and imagery—might adapt across all formats the campaign actually requires. This then leads to you guessing on the original intention behind the core designs, filling in the gaps, and sending your best guess back for approval. All this guesswork & back-and-forth slows the campaign down for everyone involved, when a little bit of foresight early on could save hours later.
Take inDrive as an example. Faced with the need to produce thousands of ads for large-scale performance campaigns, their design team spent weeks on manual production. By using Celtra’s Creative Automation platform and a modular template approach, inDrive reduced campaign delivery time from 2 weeks to 3-5 days and produced nearly 18,000 creatives for a national campaign, achieving 15x greater efficiency.
What is modular design in campaign work?
Modular ad design is a creative approach to advertising that breaks ad creatives into reusable layouts, content blocks, and assets that can be mixed and matched across campaigns for consistency, efficiency, and speed.
Think of it as designing in the fourth dimension: you’re mapping out how your content can (or shouldn’t) change over time. Whether you’re making a concept for your own in-house team or for a distant group of designers to pick up, modular design makes your concepts flexible enough to work across any campaign format. It helps you get your ad creatives live faster, with fewer revisions and back-and-forth.
And the best part? Modular ad design is not just for designers. When creative components are clearly defined, anyone on the team can contribute. Marketers, regional teams, or even content leads can adapt layouts, update messaging, and localize assets inside tools like Celtra without compromising the design integrity. That is what makes modular design so powerful across the entire organization.
Modular layouts: Build ad creatives for any format from the start
While you don’t need to design every size upfront, be sure to map out the core ones for your campaign. Think portrait, landscape, and square layout references. If your concept only includes a 1×1 square social post with no CTA, then where should the CTA go on a landscape or skyscraper display banner? How does the layout shift in these different scenarios? How does animation scale when the space doubles or shrinks to a mobile?
Much like brand guidelines, modular ad layouts define how creative elements work together across advertising formats inside Celtra. The goal is simple: take the guesswork out down the line and give enough guidance so the next designer can spend less time asking questions and more time playing with the building blocks you’ve set before them.
Modular content: plan for edge cases before they break your design
Designing for edge cases may be the single most overlooked and most important part of a campaign’s art direction. An edge case is any situation where the content doesn’t quite match the originally anticipated creative concept. That could be a CTA that is too long, a headline that still needs to fit in another language, like French or German, which are 30% longer than English on average, or a layout that has to work with a horizontal product shot instead of a vertical one.
Thinking through the edge cases early on in the campaign content can help you save time by avoiding unnecessary ad revisions. Avoid relying on a single, fixed example of a creative concept. Instead, show a couple of versions with different text lengths, imagery, or layouts. AI can also help simulate these edge cases early. It can create realistic variations of headlines, CTAs, or descriptions so you can pressure test your layouts before real content arrives. This helps ensure that both designers and non-designers working with the toolkit avoid last-minute fixes.
Modular assets: One set of files, endless adaptations
Once you’ve accounted for all possible layouts and content edge cases, it’s time to deliver modular assets that will bring the concept to life. Product shots should have transparent backgrounds so they can be placed anywhere on a canvas. Lifestyle imagery should be shot wide to allow for multiple crops from the same asset. Video edits should be delivered as layered files so they’re easy to mix and match across different durations.
AI tools can also lend a hand here. From AI-assisted retouching to smart cropping or background generation, you can prep asset variations faster and spend less time on repetitive tweaks. The last thing you need after passing off a creative direction is a stream of requests for further image retouching and last-minute video edits. By providing flexible building blocks of assets, other designers and marketers will be able to make the adjustments without relying on you for every single crop or cut.
Modular assets aren’t one-size-fits-all, but they can be shaped to fit any campaign, for any brand. Modular ad assets power faster ad production across campaigns, channels, and markets. Nike proved this with a 19.5 times boost in production efficiency using Celtra’s Creative Automation.
Bring modular design into your creative workflow
These layout, content, and asset prep tips are just a glimpse of how you can bring modular design thinking into your next campaign. When you start by planning for edge cases and building with reusability in mind, there should be less guesswork from designers down the line, fewer syncs and approvals needed along the way, and much, much more time spent on the next campaign’s “state of play”.
You don’t need to keep guessing, revising, or rebuilding every time a new format shows up. With Celtra, modular design meets automation and AI, so your team can scale faster and smarter. Design once, adapt everywhere. Use AI where it helps and spend more time in your state of play.
Frequently asked questions
Modular ad design is the practice of breaking down creative into flexible, reusable components, like layout templates, content blocks, and assets, that can be mixed and matched to work across different formats and channels. It’s a way to scale design without starting from scratch every time.
Design systems are about visual consistency: fonts, colors, and UI rules. Modular ad design is about campaign execution. It’s how you translate a single creative idea into dozens of formats, faster, without compromising quality.
Because real-world campaigns don’t live in just one format. From social to display to mobile banners, your creative needs to flex. Modular ad design makes it easier to adapt your concept without endless revisions or rework.
Layouts, copy blocks, CTAs, product images, video layers, and even pre-approved legal lines. Anything that shows up in multiple formats should be designed to move and scale with ease.
Celtra’s Creative Automation platform is built for this. You can create modular ad templates, connect them to live content feeds, and generate hundreds of on-brand ads in a fraction of the time. It’s faster, smarter, and gives your team more time to focus on the work that matters.
