The potential of visuals to attract attention and push engagement cannot be denied. You create graphic designs for your content on social media not only for storytelling but also to captivate an audience and bring them to your website. For that reason, if your graphic lacks in branding, the total goes wasted. It need not be bold and big, but simply enough to make people recognize it. Let’s delve into the ways to create social media graphics that makes it visually memorable.
Here’s the way to make your social media graphics engaging and comprising of all elements that will form a lasting impression.
#1 Set Up Your Goal
Visualizing your goal is the foundation on which your design can be created for your social media content. You have to figure out the things you are planning to do and then build your story. Sticking to a goal not only helps in the design but also in better visual effects of messages. You have to pose some questions to yourself with regard to the purpose of your post, whether you are trying to push sales, augment website traffic and page engagement and who exactly is your audience.
Besides, it is also vital that you target your audience by curating all details as to the platforms they use, are they desktop or mobile phone users, where they hang out and who they generally follow, and the message you want to send across. Once you identify your audience, target and the intent of your post, you have found your goal. Your “Why” for making the social media graphic is the first step towards this complete designing process. What follows after will be selected to carry forward this goal.
Though goals are mandatory, too many goals can lead to a busy graphic with excess text, images or fonts that can instantly put off your audience. Now after knowing about the first designing tip let’s move ahead to color.
#2 Colors
Color is fundamental to any aspect of design and creates an ambiance and tone. Exploring a color combination that expresses the emotion you prefer your viewer or brand to be associated which helps to maintain consistency. What are the values your brand promotes? Is it entertainment, established, credible or other yardsticks? You decide to select colors that highlight what your brand signifies and it can be done by beginning with two to three primary colors.
Determining the color theme is significant to the success of your graphic design.
With colors, you have to think about Contrast. This indicates light text or pictures on a dark backdrop or vice versa. To make things better, referring to a Color contrast checker helps in finding out whether your selected colors show good contrast. Steering clear from awkward color combinations will improve your brand in the long term. Colors that do not contrast well appear to gush into each other or when there is excessive contrast they create a visual vibration. Choosing the perfect color scheme for your graphic design evokes positive reactions from your audience.
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#3 Text Is Equally Important
The text represents a sequence of words while typography is the visual element of the written word. Words are effective and having an excess of words on an image can appear busy and crowded to your likely audience. Whether you are making a graphic for Instagram or Facebook, make an effort to restrict the text to one or two liners. The purpose of social media graphics is to resonate your message in a simple manner and great graphic design has text which is easy to read.
#4 Typography Is Also An Art
Picking up an ideal font that aligns perfectly with the images is challenging, but when executed flawlessly can infuse life into your graphics! Similar to the color palette, selecting a font should display the personality of your brand. Try not to go overboard- at the most, you only require two to three fonts. If you go for more than three, your audience can get distracted and your message can lose its vibrancy. After all, you prefer that your users are able to view a graphic and identify it as yours even when your logo is missing. Same as color, typography can also reflect emotions and moods and at times be more powerful compared to the copy. In fact, select wisely while choosing a font as it delivers your tone.
Keep these graphic design ideas in mind while using fonts:
- Serif fonts are ideal for print
- Sans-serif is suited for web
- Restrict your design to 3 fonts at the maximum
When you consider more than one font, match fonts with high contrast. This will make the fonts balance each other and produce that extra ‘POP’.Try using a font that contains various versions, like bold, condensed, italics, etc. A simple contrast in the font can be to include a font that is serif and another that is not.
#5 Consistency In Design
Applying consistent features of the design is an excellent way to devise your personal recognizable style ( like Post Planner executes with featured images appearing on their blog)
There are no hard and fast rules here as the text, colors, logo size and the consistent elements which you select can be to your requirement so long it remains appealing and sensible. See to it that the content you compose is consistent with your brand. Posting content continuously in the same style is difficult at times, but building a powerful brand identity will make it worthwhile.
While retaining consistency see that all the designs are cohesive on all platforms. Such consistent elements will link every post together and make your brand easy to identify. A convenient method to maintain consistency would be to acquire time to make templates for instant quotes, sales, promotions or announcements. This will let you and your team create content effortlessly and your social media followers to instantly identify your brand and further engagement.
Further, you can produce a variety while posting your social media content and share different graphics on social media. Some of the graphic design ideas to keep your inspiration rolling:
- Quotes in captivating font and shape
- Infographics/Charts
- Themed days like Motivation Monday, Throwback Thursday, etc
- Reposts
- Behind the scenes
- Fascinating Photos
Conclusion
So work with creative freedom and ensure that your designs remain consistent with your branding and showcase your products and community. Apply these graphic design tips and enhance a particular color or scale to a graphics and view the changes and elements that captures audience attention immediately. Experiment and mix various fonts and pictures and invent designs that align with your style and boosts your brand awareness and affinity and also leaves your individual mark on your designs.
