Using templates

In Ignite it's easy to save an image as a template file. Templates save all the settings from the file, animation timings, filenames, colour usage, splits, notes and of course the original artwork if any. You can also save a template without any artwork in it so that you can open a new file from the template, load up your new artwork and take advantage of all the settings in the template.

Imagine you've just made an interface for a web site and spent time splitting it up into tables, customizing the file names, the HTML settings and optimizing the GIF settings for saving the split images. Now you need to make another one with a few changes to the colour scheme for a whole new section of the web site. Wouldn't it be great if you could save the original one and re-use it with all the settings and splits in place?

Well you can! Save it as a template. When you need to make that new web site section simply create a new file from the template and import the new look artwork. All you need to do now is click to save all those split images. The optimization is already stored in the template, the splits are all there and even the file names, the HTML links, even the alt tags are all there in the template. You don't need to change a thing! Unless you want to of course.

Ignite comes with some templates to get you started. One of them is a template for creating banner adverts. Choose New from template from the File Menu and choose Banner Advert from the Templates Dialog Box. This opens an Ignite file sized for a standard banner of 468 pixels by 60 pixels.

Add as many frames as you need, create your images (or import them), use the Animation Sequencer to set the animations timings and then make an output GIF file by clicking the New output button. Click the tab for the new file to change to the output view and Ignite will automatically optimize the GIF for you. All you need to do now is click the Save this output button on the Inspector and it's done. Of course you can easily optimize the GIF yourself using the Inspector if you want to.

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