Two ideas I really liked were Triumph and Despair's take on stat blocks. He has stream-lined the stat blocks to make them easier to read while playing (I hate doing maths while playing too).
As I am not very good at Photoshop and wanted to be able to create and modify them very quickly. I borrowed some of the thedearth2 artwork and used it as a background for a PowerPoint slide file.
With PowerPoint I can just duplicate a slide and modify some text and within a minute or 2 have a half decent NPC card which can be exported as a PDF if needed.
Here is a link to an example PowerPoint slide.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mp5mrlr7x9umyte/AsteriodBase.pptx?dl=0