Don’t Be Afraid of Design
If the idea of being a graphic designer or trying to design something makes you anxious - don’t be! While it may take a designer to create a dynamic logo or poster, it doesn’t always require a professional to create graphics for your social media feed. Why? Because social media graphics are digested in seconds. Think about it. When you’re scrolling through your social media feed, you stop because something catches your eye. That could be a color, a word, the account that posted it or even just scroll fatigue. Social media users typically browse using their mobile device and the average phone screen is roughly five inches in size. Which means social media graphics shouldn’t be complex. The more complicated the graphic, the more content will get lost in the downscale. Downscale is just a fancy way of saying it looks great when it’s big on a desktop but maybe it ends up being just a dot of color when it’s small on a phone.
Why work harder when you can work smarter? There’s tons of apps and new software that help you to be a designer like the good ol’ Microsoft Publisher flyer days. While I don’t think these templates, icons and fonts solve all your problems, they can be a blessing for providing some sort of marketing to a new or struggling business. My favorite tool for doing that is Adobe Spark. It’s $10 a month and it is so easy to use that you can do it all on your phone! If you’re creating graphics for social media, I always recommend testing it or creating it on your mobile device. This ensures your digital audience will experience your graphic the best way possible. With Adobe Spark, you can create a graphic using one of their many free templates or you can start from scratch. Spark also has searchable icons, trendy Adobe fonts and suggestive color palettes. Once you’ve created a design you love, you can also resize the same graphic to be the ideal size for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Stories, LinkedIn or Pinterest. The best part about Adobe Spark is you can add easy animations to icons and fonts to create a more eye catching social media graphic.
Once you’ve gotten the hang of it, modifying designs can help streamline posting. You can add your brand assets like logos, fonts and color palettes over time so you can start unifying your designs. Here’s a few social media graphics I created for Design Sacramento using Spark. Each graphic took less than twenty minutes to create! So next time you’re stressing out about not having something to post with your social media content, consider creating your own graphic for it. It’s easier than you think.
