RelayThat Review (2023 Guide)

In this review, we’ll be diving into RelayThat, look at pros, cons, important features, and more.

RelayThat Review Summary

For someone like me who is creatively challenged when it comes to sitting in front of a computer and work on a graphic design tool, I find the whole thing a huge saver of my precious time.

It gives me a bunch of readymade templates that I can play around with, change the fonts, change the colors, edit the texts, replace the images and insert my logo before finalizing it.

In that respect, RelayThat is a good piece of software to try out and gets my vote.

Pros and Cons of RelayThat

RelayThat Interface – Simplicity Meets Usability

One of the key benefits of using RelayThat is the sheer number of options under each creative group.

I’ll come to that in greater detail a little further into this discussion. But before that let’s take a quick look at the interface.

Once you are signed in you will be presented with the My Workspace.

This is your landing page, your assembly area for all your online creative ideas if you chose to be so.

There are three options to chose from.

You can choose the one you want to create your next project in. These are the Default, the Education, and the Personal Branding options.

I chose Personal Branding because many among you might be looking for an easy-to-use tool to develop their social media marketing materials and I found this to be the perfect example to demonstrate the power of RelayThat as an online graphic designing tool.

As I was referring to above, you will find a larger number of creative options under each creative group.

Let’s say that you need a wide post or a Facebook ad for your business. As soon as you select that option you will notice that on the left panel there are now more than a dozen creative ads using variations of the theme you had chosen.

You select any one of them and further work on that.

As stated above, these default themes use the default colors, font, and dummy texts. You have to change all that.

But the beauty of this tool is that it keeps the process of changing the design variables very easy so that at no point you feel that you are doing the heavy lifting.

That is always done by the tool.

Changes in the design variables are however limited.

Changing Background Image on RelayThat

Coming back to the changes.

Let’s say that you don’t like the background image.

Click on images on the left panel and select any image from here and drag it to the creative (or to the backdrop icon on the far-right panel) and it replaces the default background.

Alternatively, you can upload your photos or photos to which you own the copyright. It is very simple.

Click on the backdrop and an upload window will open up. Find the image on your PC, Mac, or network storage, and click done.

Your image will get uploaded to the design server and inserted into the creative.

Little things go a long way to create that element of satisfaction that accumulates over the entire experience of any tool, and not just a piece of software.

In this case, the image you upload automatically gets resized and re-proportioned as per the creative size so that you don’t have to do the manual chore of resizing and pulling things to proportion.

At every step, you will realize the speed and the efficiency this tool can bring to your designing process flow.

Changing Color Scheme on RelayThat

The color scheme is a sensitive issue because every business has its favorite color schemes.

So, default color schemes shall have to go. You can change the color of the border, the overlay, or the section along with the backdrop all from the right panel.

You can even switch off the border and other colors for a less cluttered look. You can change colors and alter styles and do the basic stuff.

But I noticed that the templates are very rigid. You cannot change them, move some of the elements or add additional design elements.

That kind of makes sense because this tool is designed to make things quick and professional, and the target user is not proficient with Photoshop or any other graphic design tool.

So, giving a ton of options to change might slow things down for the target user rather than make it quicker.

And it is also likely to make things a bit too overwhelming for someone like me who is not a designer, to begin with.

Still, I would have preferred a bit more options to tinker with.

RelayThat Fonts

For any graphic or creative work fonts play an important role just as colors and layout do.

Some ideas make or break because of the choice of the font by the creative artist.

Thankfully, you are not limited when you are using RelayThat.

There are hundreds of fonts that are already loaded into the software that you can play around with.

If you want some cool suggestions for changing the fonts in a creative, I suggest you use the Ideas tab under Fonts.

This is a neat little tool that gives you a pair of fonts to replace the existing ones on a creative.

That way it is faster and allows you to complete a quick look and finalize the creative in no time at all.

It is this and many other small things which impressed me during the trial of the software.

Import Custom Fonts in RelayThat

Another cool feature of RelayThat is it allows you to upload your fonts.

I know for sure that not too many online graphic tools allow you to do that. This opens up a few interesting opportunities.

You can now maintain the same look and feel of your print media advertisements and or use the existing font styles that are used in the letterhead or everyday advertisements and bring them online for all your online marketing and promotional communications.

It creates a sort of uniformity across all marketing efforts of a company.

Many times, we want our print and online advertisements/communications to have the same font.

Just like using the color scheme or the logo of the business, this helps in creating and maintaining the brand image of the business much more easily.

The option to add fonts is embedded in Fonts on the left panel.

Open Fonts, scroll down the left panel and you will see the option to upload your fonts.

In the online graphic design space, designing tools come and go.

Many of you may have already used Canva and are familiar with its capabilities.

RelayThat in many ways is similar to Canva, except that the interface is better designed and there is a better flow to it which I find easier to use.

But then this is a subjective thing, and your opinion might differ from mine.

RelayThat – What I Don’t Like About It

Now it is time for some of the negatives.

I have created a handful of hypothetical creatives in RelayThat.

Having done that, I am in a good position to make a judgment on the usability and capability of this online graphic design tool.

I am happy to say that for the most part, I love what I see. From what I have used, I feel this is a neat little tool that works well for basic graphic and creative design requirements.

For someone like me who is creatively challenged when it comes to sitting in front of a computer and work on a graphic design tool, I find the whole thing a huge saver of my precious time.

It gives me a bunch of readymade templates that I can play around with, change the fonts, change the colors, edit the texts, replace the images and insert my logo before finalizing it.

I didn’t realize it but I surpassed myself and all the credit goes to RelayThat.

That said, there are some serious limitations and some omissions which the developers should look at for their future revisions of this software.

For anyone better than me in graphic design but who wants a fast and snappy tool to work with, RelayThat lacks a few features.

To start I could not find the option to add additional widgets or creative elements in a template.

I wanted to add a button and a slide into a creative that I was working on but I couldn’t.

I realized that I had to choose a SmartLayout (that’s what they call each template) that already has a button and only then could I edit the properties of the button.

So, there is no option to add a button to a creative if I want to. Now that’s seriously limiting. Don’t you think?

The same goes for the shapes. So, while you can switch off and, on the shapes, and to some extent change colors, there is no way to add a shape to a template to change it.

It seems that the whole purpose is focused on finding a fast graphic/creative design solution where the user will not be making large-scale changes to an existing template.

Rather it is expected that s/he will be accepting the template more or less as it is.

In that respect, RelayThat is a good piece of software to try out and gets my vote.