Graphic design, just like any other art form, has evolved over the years. It has come a long way since the term was first coined by book designer and illustrator, William Dwiggins, in the 1920s. During that time, he used to categorize his work in print communications like calligraphy, lettering, book design, typography, and illustrations.
By the 1950s, the term underwent a change and was then used to describe visual creations like street signage, posters, and print advertisements. And with the onset of technology, today, the application of graphic design has changed dramatically.
Now, the term goes beyond print materials, spanning across virtual reality and digital worlds. With so many iterations of the term, graphic design, it can get quite confusing as to what it actually means. Simply put, graphic design is an art form that deals with visual communication.
It combines words, images, and ideas to communicate information to the audience effectively. To sum it up, graphic design is a medium of conveying ideas and information through design and visuals.
Let’s check about Social Media Graphic Design.
What is social media graphic design?
For businesses to boost their engagement, social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest are some channels to communicate directly with the target audience. It is where you develop connections with content that entertains your followers while creating brand awareness. Though social media is a useful business model, it’s highly competitive too.
Social media is a highly competitive platform, so it takes a great deal of planning and hard work to taste success, both on the design and content front.
What is included in social media design?
Graphics are an important part of any social media strategy. To increase social media users interaction and engagement, ensure your social media pages look sharp by using a variety of high-quality, diverse, and valuable images.
Social media design is used for the creation, planning, and development of visual content for social media to get the followers attention. Brands can build brand recognition by investing in design and creating content that resonates with their target audiences.
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What Makes Graphic Designing So Popular?
This form of visual communication is widely popular among marketers and brands. Every industry has used graphic design to inform, please, and eventually persuade consumers to take the desired action. It acts as an essential bridge between the brand and its audience.
From photography, typography to illustrations and motion graphics, graphic designing puts together these elements to create eye-catching visuals that capture the target audience’s attention, open new markets, and efficiently sell products/services.
It comes as no surprise that every marketing strategy revolves around creating graphic designs, and here’s why:
Efficiency
Graphic design is an easy and quick way to share information for any brand. Graphic designers use the fact – humans are heavily influenced by visuals – to their benefit. Creating infographics and or visuals to summarize lengthy content is an efficient way to communicate with your audiences.
Consistency
The more content you provide that helps in solving a problem or gives easy-to-understand information, the more audiences will start thinking of you as an expert on the subject. This helps in building credibility for your brand. Most brands use graphics/visuals to establish the credibility of their brands amongst their competitors.
Creativity
With n number of tools and software available, it has never been easier to create engaging content. Graphic designing is a weapon used by marketers to slay their competition by creating aesthetically pleasing, original content. Their creativity helps them in creating an impact on their audience. Check out the guide for social media graphic design tools.
Create an Impression
First impressions matter. From your latest social media platform post, business card, a flyer to an online advertisement, or your website, can be a platform your potential customers can interact with you.
Designing creative and authentic graphics/visuals gives you an edge over your competitors and creates a lasting impression.
Graphic design has come a long way. Though the medium of graphic design has evolved, the purpose remains the same, effectively communicating information through aesthetically pleasing visuals and minimalistic content.
One of the most common tools that marketers use to create brand awareness using graphic designs is social media platforms. Today, social media platforms are a must-have for all brands that want to communicate effectively with their audience as well as have a strong online presence.
5 Social Media Platforms That Have Changed The Face of Digital Marketing
social media networks are more significant game-changers than any other platform used for marketing and creating an online identity. It is an excellent tool for marketers to generate new leads and reach a broader audience. Every industry in this day and age uses social media to marketing strategy, to create brand awareness, generate leads, share information, and or build relationships and credibility.
But using social media account is not as easy as it may seem. Every platform is different, and each of these platforms has specifications with regard to designing the graphic that every designer should keep in mind while creating images.
Here, we have listed 5 of the top social media channels along with their features and specifications:
It comes as no surprise that Facebook tops the list. With more than 1.45 billion daily active users and 2.20 billion monthly active users, Facebook is used by brands worldwide to engage with the audience, advertise their products/services, collect reviews, and sometimes even for customer service.
Sizing:
- Cover Photo: 852 x 315
- Profile Picture: 180 x 180
- Post: 1200 x 630
Pinterest is the ideal platform for e-commerce businesses that allows you to upload pictures, descriptions of the pictures, and a clickable link. With over 175 million monthly users, it helps in generating leads and increasing traffic to your website.
Sizing:
- Pins: 600 x 1260
- Profile Image: 165 x 165
Instagram is most popular among teenagers and young adults. It is a platform that offers various features like IGTV, Instagram Reels, Instagram Stories, Instagram Live, etc. and has over 1 billion monthly active users.
These features can be used effectively by designers and marketers to interact with audiences, create brand awareness, and even stay up to date with new trends that are ruling the world of social media.
Sizing:
- Post: 1080 x 1080
- Stories: 1080 x 1920
- Portrait: 1080 x 1350
- Landscape: 1080 x 566
- Instagram Reels: 15secs
- Profile Picture: 110 x 110 pixels
Twitter is a fast-paced platform with over 320 million active users and is a site for news, politics, sports, entertainment, and more. What makes it stand out from the other platforms on the list is that it mainly focuses on real-time information and is the ideal platform for brands that publish original content regularly. Find the top graphic designers to follow on Twitter.
Sizing:
- Header Photo: 1500 x 500
- Profile Picture: 400 x 400
- Post: 900 x 512
Which better platform than Linkedin for B2B marketing? With over 562 million registered users and 294 monthly active users, it offers advertising opportunities to brands, such as sending personalized ads to Linkedin inboxes, displaying advertisements by the side of the site, and boosting your content.
Sizing:
- Banner Image: 1584 x 396
- Profile Picture: 400 x 400
- Social Media Graphic Design
Planning ahead and knowing what works best for your visuals will help you go a long way. Designing a graphic according to the dimensions of various social media platforms is crucial to prevent your image or video from getting cropped in unnatural ways.
It may seem tedious, but having a quick look at the size chart can make a huge difference.
Having an understanding of the platform and the dimensions concerned are just a few steps towards the direction of creating viral content.
As a graphic designer, you have to keep up with the trends, kind of content, and the new features hitting the market. Find the top 9 tips about social media graphic design.
Incorporate your branding into your design
Now branding is one of the most important social media visual design tips. A social network graphic can be easily incorporated with the color of your company logo. The internet should be able to run in less than 2 seconds.
What effort should I put in?
You can add your logo and a few digits to each graphic if you prefer a minimalist look, such as these graphics from Think growth.
However, this consistency helps create strong brand recognition across all their websites.
Make text the focus of your social media graphic design
Back in the day, the way I first started creating my own content, adding my own title to an Instagram image was what I really liked most. Several other pages have text-heavy graphics in them. Probably similar to this: This really was one way that a user who had very limited design experience could differentiate himself.
It also made for an excellent reading experience than just the stock photo. I’ve stopped writing them in recent days but it is possible to use them effectively with several caveats. It is obviously a good design and easy to use. Meet the guide for creating engaging videos for social media promotions.
8 Tips for Social Media Graphic Design
We are surrounded by information, especially while browsing through social media. But the amount of content that we recollect and remember is based on our perception. And the most primary kind of perception is visual.
90% of information perceived by our brains is visual, and based on this fact, designers and marketers give more importance to graphic designs.
Designing a graphic is not about putting all the elements together and calling it a day. It requires attention to detail and knowledge of designing, colors, fonts, etc.
With regard to social media, this requires even more attention so that your graphic design or visual not only grabs the attention but also makes them stop browsing through and focus on your post.
To help you out, we have put together 8 tips for designing graphics for social media:
Color
Colors have the ability to evoke emotions and affect people’s moods. When choosing the right color for your image, avoid using monotone color combinations, and focus on picking up the right hue that conveys your brand’s tone.
Be bold and give bright colors a shot while inserting new tints in a balanced manner. But be careful, you do not want your images to look overwhelming.
Tip: A fresh color of pop can help boost social media engagement.
Typography
Making people read pictures is much harder than just noticing pictures. Therefore choosing optimum fonts and structure can be crucial while developing visual content for Facebook. Statistics show that smartphone users will reach 188.33 million monthly by 2020.
Think about that number as an illustration for an illustration that has text on the image and ensure that the text is easily read.
People dislike the complex typography on Facebook. Your user wants to understand your message and make it legible as your main goal. The pictures are often dominated by text which is boring.
Contrast
As visual beings, we love the contrast. It can be anything, ranging from color, sizes, layouts to texture, type, shapes, etc. For graphic design, it can further prove beneficial for aligning graphical elements and focusing on a particular visual element.
Tip: Use contrast to strengthen a design idea/concept.
Template
Having a pre-made template has many benefits. Using the same template for a particular type of post will help the audience to easily recollect where the post originates from and what message it will communicate.
Tip: Non-graphic designers can use pre-existing templates to whip up a form their of social media marketing.
Style
Style makes a design recognizable. Trying different approaches and techniques will make your content look different than what your viewers are used to. Diverse and original graphic design solutions never have and will go out of style.
Tip: Give complex combinations of typefaces, colors, compositions, etc. a shot.
Branding
Creating a graphic design with your brand’s name or logo is essential. With visuals getting shared a lot on social media platforms, make sure that your image doesn’t get lost, and people are able to identify your company/organization.
Tip: Mention your company’s name or website rather than adding a logo, unless of course, your company is world-famous, and the logo is well-known.
Clarity
Simple and clear are the golden words to stand by while creating a graphic design. Keeping the balance between being informative and being simple is necessary.
Having too many elements in your graphic design can suppress the message you want to convey, and so, having a clear, simple visual is a must.
Tip: Create a design that makes your message obvious since you have a short period to impress your audience.
Call to Action
Let’s move away from designing for a moment here; it is important to understand that every visual has a reason. And as a designer, it is great to have an eye-catching design, but having caught their attention is not enough. So don’t forget to add encouraging, interactive, or call to action elements to your design.
Tip: Interactive and engaging designs reach a wider audience.
Visuals play an integral role in planning a social media campaign. And a graphic designer’s contribution to its success of it is unquestionable.
By making sure that each design reflects the message you’re trying to convey on social media platforms, you promote your brand’s tone and marketing goals.
Social media offers an opportunity to experiment with new, original content, and as a designer, grab those opportunities!
Conclusion
There are many more people who are using similar pictures for their own projects. If you use one, it disappears the benefit you receive is based on images. Sometimes the same stock photos disappear to the background. But if you do these tips, you can produce stunning social media graphic that captures the interest of people.
Have a look at tips to enhance your social media presence from All Time Designs.
