Creating Graphics for your Personal Brand
You have a passion. You have a purpose. You have a plan. But now you need beautiful graphics for your business/brand, right? You scour the internet for free stock images. You’re overloaded with emails offering a batch of photos for a price.
I’m here to tell you, you don’t need to spend so much time online looking for stock photography or graphic designers. If you have a vision, a computer and smart phone, you can simply create beautiful graphics on your own in a short period of time.
Follow these steps to create your own graphics for your brand:
- Determine your brand colors. I highly recommend you choose no more than 5 colors; 1 highlight color to be used sparingly, 2 colors that compliment your highlight color, and 2 neutral colors. If you need inspiration, check out coolors.co, a color palette generator (this is where I developed my brand colors!)
- Choose your brand fonts. I would stick to three and possibly a highlight font (possibly used only in your logo if you have one.) You’ll need a font for your Header title, subtitle and text. I like to use fontpair.co to find great font combinations.
- Download Canva. Canva is a free online tool to create graphics for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, your blog and more. Definitely start this process on your computer first. There is an app for Canva, but setting up everything and batching on the computer is much easier and quicker. Canva is loaded with graphic templates, free photos, backgrounds and text overlays. Once you narrow down your design, you can format your design for Facebook posts, Instagram posts, Pinterest and blog graphics. Now you can start batching a bunch of graphics for your biz.
- Create a Dropbox account. Go to dropbox.com and create an account. Why? I save all my graphics to dropbox, so I can easily transfer my graphics to my phone!
- Download the Canva and Dropbox apps. On your phone, go to the App Store and download Canva and Dropbox. Simply sign in to your accounts. Now you can download your graphics from dropbox and make changes to your graphics in Canva. Such a time saver and you’re ready to post on the go!
I hope these steps help you and take the stress out of designing your brand graphics. If you still want to invest in beautiful stock photos then check out Styled Stock Society; I’ve used their photos for my brand!
Don’t forget to join my tribe and grab my free Social Media Weekly Planner — organize your social platforms in one spot!
For more design, branding and social media tips join my Facebook community…weekly tips and videos!
Thank you for these tips <3 Steps 1 and 2 are especially helpful for me. I'll limit my colors and fonts from now on!
Ohhh! That colors site is going to be helpful! I feel like I have no eye what so ever for stuff like that!
I hope it helps you Denise.
Hi
thanks so much for sharing, I`ve been conscious how most pages look glamorous and well done.
Will follow your tips to create better graphics to make my site more appealing to readers.
Great post! I’m obsessed with Canva!! I also like Haute Chocolate stock photos as well.
Hi Tina! Haute does have great photos and I believe they offer some for free!
Thanks Allison!! These are great tips, I have been trying to figure out what my brand colors are… I keep changing them. Haha. I will have to check out these websites!
This is really helpful, I do feel like I have 2 left hands when it comes to being creative but with the clear written easy to understand, I`m sure I too can create graphics 2 left hands or not.Thanks so much for sharing.
I use Canva thanks for these awesome steps
I love Canva! I am about to go check out coolors.co right now. 🙂 Thanks!
Thanks so much for this post – I love Canva and use it all the time, and will definitely check out some of these other websites!
These are such helpful tips!
Great list! Thank you for sharing! I love Canva so much. No idea what I would do without it!!
Thank you for the tips! I’m such a newbie at all this!
I really need to spend more time experimenting with Canva. I hear so many great things about it! Love the post. Dropbox is a lifesaver!
These are great tips! I love how you suggest one highlighted color two to go with that and two neutral. I use canva a lot and it is amazing! Thank you for the great tips.