I ship App Store screenshots and promo videos without a designer

May 25, 2026

I cannot design. I still ship App Store screenshots with marketing copy and phone frames, and 9:16 promo videos with music and pacing, for every app I make. The trick is that I do not make them. I render them.

Marketing assets are just code you have not written yet

A store screenshot is a phone frame, a background, a headline, and a shot of your app. A promo video is a sequence of those with timing and music. None of that needs a design tool. It needs an HTML file.

So that is what I build: a self-contained HTML page that lays out the frame, the copy, and the app UI exactly how I want it. For screenshots, a headless browser opens it and captures a PNG. For video, the same browser screen-records the page as its CSS animations play, scene by scene, and a quick ffmpeg pass stitches the frames together and lays the music over the top. HTML in, store-ready asset out.

Why rendered beats hand-made, and beats screen recording

The instinct for a promo video is to screen-record the app. Do not. Screen recordings are inconsistent, painful to caption, and you re-shoot the whole thing every time anything changes. Rendering from HTML is the opposite:

Deterministic. Same input, same output, pixel for pixel. No "let me try that take again."
Editable. The headline is text in a file. The pacing is a number. Change a word, re-render, done. No reopening a design tool, no re-recording.
Crisp. You are compositing real assets at full resolution, not capturing a compressed screen.
Isolated. The marketing lives entirely outside the app's codebase, so cutting a new trailer never risks the thing you are selling.

Make it a recipe, not a one-off

The real unlock is doing it the same way every time, and writing that down as a reusable recipe: where the templates live, the one command that renders them, the gotchas. Now "make a new set of screenshots" or "cut a 30-second promo with different scenes" is a short conversation and one command, not a weekend in a tool I do not know.

That is the whole move for a non-designer. You are not getting better at design. You are turning design into a build step, then making the build step boring and repeatable. The first version takes an afternoon to set up. Every version after that takes minutes.

Where the AI fits

I do not write the HTML templates from scratch either. I describe the asset I want, my assistant writes the HTML and the render script, I look at the output, and we go back and forth until it is right. The model is good at "lay this out, animate these scenes, match these brand colors." I am good at knowing when it looks cheap. Between us, an app gets a full set of store assets without anyone who can actually design touching it.

It will not win an award. It clears the bar, looks intentional, and ships today. For a solo project, that is exactly the trade you want.