Social Media Graphics

Content, colors, typography, and fonts are all a part of graphic design for social media. I’ve been professionally designing for social media for about seven years and I’m still learning new techniques every day. Here are some tips that I’ve picked up over my seven years. I'm happy to share them with you!

Good branding is like deciding what to wear when you leave the house!

How To Brand

Colors, fonts, and styles all make up a brand. Before designing and posting content on social media platforms, it’s best to have a brand style sheet figured out beforehand. It’s so important. You don’t want to display content that’s not cohesive on social media and be seen as unorganized by your audience. Good branding is like deciding what to wear when you leave the house. You would want all your clothes to match and be seen as clean or neat! Do you step outside or go public while wearing unorganized clothing? I don't think you do because you're reading this blog post! You care about your brand and social media!

Colors

When I was a sophomore in college, my Teacher Assistant for Painting, told me that I had an eye for color. I knew that I could match colors well, but I guess taking a painting class just developed my gift for colors! I later took another class titled “Color” from an amazing Professor that called me “Magnificent”. He was so kind! Here’s what I learned about colors: before choosing colors for your brand, you need to research color theory! What is color theory? It studies the colors that work best with one another. If you're not familiar with colors, try looking up a color wheel. A color wheel will display all the colors that are complementary and supplementary to one another. The colors that work best with one another will be next to each other which is called complementary. The colors that appear across from one another are called supplementary, they will work great together as well. Maybe take some screenshots of your favorite color palettes. Then narrow your favorites down to which one best represents your brand.

Fonts

Choosing the correct fonts is so important! Think of fonts like musical notes or beats in a song. Fonts can make or break your brand mood! You need to first decide your brand’s vibe, meaning is it professional, playful, funny, etc. You don’t want to choose a funny font for a professional realtor company. It would probably look something like uniformed or be taken as an unprofessional realtor (someone who doesn’t know what they are doing). Fonts matter! Research your brand’s character/mood and go from there! Typography on the other hand is the way fonts are arranged in a layout! You might think about kerning (space between letters) or the placement of fonts. Play with some types of layouts! That’s the only way to find out what works best!

Layout/Templates

Layout is the visual design of the graphic. It’s how your audience will convey your social media graphic. You can start by creating a layout template for graphic categories. Creating templates or choosing a template to work with will be easier for you when you need to post quickly. REMEMBER for Instagram the dimensions are 1080 X 1080 PX.

Content

What message are you trying to convey to your audience? It’s the written copy or words that accompany the social media graphic on the post and in the post caption!

Stylesheet

Once you have your brand colors, fonts, content, and layout, you can create a style sheet that displays the combined brand assets.

Software

When I first started creating social media graphics, I created them in Canva. What’s Canva? It’s an online design platform that provides the non-designing person with templates that they can easily customize! Canva has a free account and Canva Work. Canva Work allows you to upload your branding, like colors, fonts, and templates. It depends on your budget. Canva is a great option if you can’t afford to hire a graphic designer right away. If you’re a professional graphic designer or someone who loves designing then Photoshop will probably be better for you because it’s a more powerful system! You can even use Canva and Photoshop together.

I hope you all enjoyed my break-down for social media graphics with an emphasis on branding! When I create graphics this is usually the method that I prefer to use. Most of the brands I work with already have a brand style sheet in place, so I use their fonts, colors, and logos! I wish you all the best with designing social media graphics and branding!

Hey Girl, You're Fantastic and You Got This!