GRAPHIC DESIGN FOR SOCIAL MEDIA: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO GRAPHIC DESIGN FOR SOCIAL MEDIA SUCCESS.
Are you struggling with your social media output? Are you finding it difficult to reach the right audience and target market, and gain interactions and build community? This could be due to your current methods and creative output via social media, which isn’t helping your brand image! The secret solution to this problem could be your design…
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In the extremely crowded space of social media, it’s incredibly hard to stand out, make an impact and build a solid brand community with eye-catching and professional content. Most business tend to either guess what they should do next, are inconsistent with posting, have poor designed visuals and generally attempt to go with the flow. This is the wrong way to approach your creative output on socials.
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​With the secrets and specific methods highlighted in this article, you will succeed on social media. If you apply all the following steps to your social media plan, you will see results. People often miss out the importance of design and visual communication of social media. This article will prove that it is vital, and if not the most important aspect of succeeding with social media. Read on; to transform the way you’ll do your social media output for your business!
The Importance of Graphic Design for Social Media.
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Why Graphic Design is Crucial for Social Media Success:
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Visual Appeal.
A well designed and visually planned social media post, can catch the viewers’ attention immediately. This encourages them to read and interact with what you have included in your post. On the other end of the spectrum, if you put out a post with no design or visual consideration, most viewers would simply ignore what you have posted, as it is not enticing or inviting for them to want to engage with your post. Through the application of proven design techniques and methods, this will attract your audience to view and engage with what you’d like them to.
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Brand Consistency.
Consistent use of your brand is the most important aspect of maintaining professional communication with your ideal audience. Use of your logo, brand colours, visual identity assets and rules effectively in the correct formatting is vital to business success and building trust with your target audience. Imagine putting yourself in the shoes of your ideal target audience. If you saw a social media account with inconsistent branding and where their visual design is all over the place, would you trust them?
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Enhanced Engagement.
Well thought out and planned social media posts, that utilise consistent brand rules and effective design, receive much higher interaction success than those who don’t. It seems obvious, doesn’t it? This is because carefully thought out and use of effective design methods tap into the emotions of the viewer, and use psychological methods, proven to attract attention.
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Conveying Messages Effectively.
Social media posts are a great way to communicate important information effectively to your audience and community. Sometimes, important or complicated information needs to be communicated to your audience via your social media channels. Use of effective and well thought out design can make this process easier for the reader to understand what you’re communicating to them. Detailed and simple graphics or visual elements are a great way to simplify messages, ensuring that your viewers easily understand what you’re communicating, in a fun and interactive way.
Key Elements of Effective Social Media Graphic Design.
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Essential Elements for Stunning Social Media Graphics:
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Colour Schemes.
Use of consistent colours that align with your brand guidelines, ensure consistency across all your social channels and general visual output from your business. If your brand and guidelines have been built correctly, then the colours that are included will be highly detailed and would’ve been carefully selected to appeal to your ideal target audience. They should also convey the overall mission of your business and brand using colour psychology principles.
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Typography.
Your typography should include similar principles to your colour scheme, in that they need to directly correlate to the way you’d like to communicate to your ideal target audience and the style in which you’d like to communicate with them in. Typography is integral to the tone in which you communicate, two different font stylings can have very different tones and impressions on the reader. Carefully selecting the right style and making sure that they are easy to read is integral to a solid brand.
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Imagery and Icons.
Using high quality images and icons are one of the most important aspects of communicating via social media. Your images hold the invaluable skill of portraying an emotion or feeling to your target audience viewer. If you’d like your viewer to feel a certain way when viewing your content, then this can be done by effective imagery. Have you ever been scrolling through social media and noticed a blurry image or a terrible image selection? It doesn’t make you want to interact or trust that business, does it?
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Layout and Composition.
A well-structured layout of designed elements for a social media post, ensures that the viewer can easily read and understand the message you’re communicating with them. Use of methods and principles such as the rule of thirds, can ensure that your designs are visually appealing, easy on the eye for viewers and easy to interact with. They should also be made in a way that can be easily read and understood, with correct spacing between titles and body text and general spacing of objects.
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Consistency.
Circling back on consistency, use of brand assets and elements across your social media posts in an evenly spaced out and consistent manor, ensures that your brand is displayed effectively. A clear social media plan for what is being designed and posted each day is a great way to ensure success and growth, if this is stuck to and maintained correctly.
Tools and Resources for Social Media Graphic Design.
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Top Tools and Resources for Creating Stunning Social Media Graphics:
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Graphic Design Subscription Service.
A great way to ensure, that all rules and guidelines are met with the above principles, would be to invest in a Graphic Design Subscription Service. These are a great way for you to access an entire creative team for a fixed and affordable monthly subscription which is more cost effective than hiring a single in-house member of staff for your team. Gain access to the luxury of unlimited graphic design requests without the worry of going over budget or dealing with complicated agencies or unreliable freelance Designers. Find out more here…
Stock Image Libraries.
To gain access to high quality and useful images, you can use free stock image websites such as Unsplash, Pexels and Shutterstock. These are a great way to access free high-quality images, if you don’t have the ability to generate your own imagery or if you’re looking for a free way to access some stunning image options for social media.
Icon and Font Resources.
Use of unique fonts and eye-catching icons can be very useful to draw the attention of your ideal target audience and community members. Websites such as Google Fonts can be a great way to gain access to some of these resources to use for yourself.
Best Practices for Social Media Graphic Design.
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Best Practices to Enhance Your Social Media Graphic:
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Keep it Simple.
A great way to succeed with Graphic Design and social media is to avoid as much clutter as possible. Keep all your designs and visuals as easy and simple as possible so that it’s not complicated and that it’s easy for the reader to understand. Simplicity is key. The less wording and information, the better!
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Use High-Quality Images.
Blurry images are a no go! It doesn’t create a good impression for your brand, and it cheapens the value that you’re trying to convey. Make sure that every image is clear and high-quality to the best standard that can be produced. It matters a lot and creates a big impression on viewers!
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Incorporate Branding Elements.
Incorporating high quality images and brand assets is crucial to ensuring brand consistency across all your social channels. This reinforces your brand styling and keeps everything consistent with your brand in every post and with the quality of the creative output, with high image quality.
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Optimise for Different Platforms.
Every social media platform has different standards and dimensions for how to output and post media. If you are posting the same content and designs across multiple platforms and channels, then everything needs to be tailored individually. This evokes professionalism and attention to detail for your target audience which further builds reassurance and trust for them in your business.
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Test and Iterate.
Social media is a fast and evolving system of creative output. You should test and iterate with multiple options and ideas for how you would like to output your creative communications on your social media channels. It can be a difficult process to nail, but if you apply all the methods in this article and include every detail and consistency, then you will succeed. Most importantly, enjoy the process and have fun!
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Conclusion.
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Social media is a difficult landscape to navigate, especially successfully, including relevant and in-depth design methods to ensure efficient content output. If you apply all the tips and tricks in this article with consistency and careful consideration, then you will succeed on social media. Don’t forget to utilise some incredibly useful services to help you with your creative output, such as a Graphic Design Subscription Service. Click here to find out more…