Designing for the Online Socialite: ‘Branding Yourself’ through Social Media
There’s no denying reality; the age of social media is definitely upon us! Recent studies suggest that on average, we spend a minimum of 2 hours a day on social media. And this figure is rising each year.
As we begin to live life digitally, the importance of controlling your online image has becomes more important than what you wear. What you type online is fast becoming more important than what you say in real life. With this in mind, it’s understandable why people spend so much time tweaking their posts and updates, beautifying their portraits and designing their latest event invitations. After all, the internet IS a public domain.
As the world’s single largest social media platform, Facebook is the primary way we communicate and share information. That makes it an important tool for anyone to master. With the ability to upload photos, organize events, spread information and build a fan base, Facebook is irrefutably one of the most significant developments of the 21st century. Thankfully, following the rise of this social media behemoth, many online designers and photo enhancers began specializing in Facebook covers, posts and event art. When your Facebook looks good, it attracts people. We all know of the myriad memes and pics which ‘went viral’ due to the interconnected nature of modern social media, emphasizing the importance of aesthetics when getting your message across.
Fotor
Fotor is an awesome site for online photo editing. Like a number of established designing/image enhancement platforms, Fotor is streamlined with Facebook, making it a great starting place to ‘beautify’ your posting. The templates used by facebook are typically for covers, for posts and for events. All of these can be found in the ‘design’ section of Fotor, along with a sizeable number of pre-designed templates.
Thankfully, these days one doesn’t need a ‘diploma of Photoshop’ to become a social media superstar. With such a huge range of free and online designers available, you can do it all and more with never before seen efficiency. Fotor is one such online designer. With loads of great features and templates, we will be using this great program to show you how to give your social media the ultimate ‘makeover’!
Facebook and Fotor
To begin, let’s look at the biggest social media platform on the planet Earth, Facebook. Not just a platform to share trending memes and pics of your pets. Facebook is now the first thing potential employers will check, as well as your primary way of communicating with friends and family. Spending a few minutes to ensure every post you make is a good one is never a bad investment. Which is why we began using Fotor to do some basic edits.
Fotor’s ‘Graphic Design’ feature is broken down into a number of templates, based on functionality. The ‘Facebook Posts’ and ‘Facebook Covers’ offer a range of pre-designed options for different types of posts. As we’ll be focusing on the Facebook designs, we’ll begin with the standard template:
Using Fotor
To begin, think carefully about the type of post you’re going to make. There’re loads of pre-made designs to choose from. In this case we chose a fairly standard ‘Part Time’ event template:
For this design, we’ll keep the current background image but alter the text:
Removing the background overlays, we can change the script easily to suite your post.
To bring out the text, we added a simple quadrangle from the ‘basic shapes’ sticker box. Then, we altered the transparency before shifting it’s ‘overlay’ layer to the background.
And it’s that simple! As the background and other elements we not heavily modified, this whole process took us under 4 minutes. Imagine what we could achieve in 5!
While this took us such a short period of time to accomplish, there are literally hours of creative fun to be had. Fotor, like many online editors, lets you enhance photos. Meaning, you completely design a Facebook post or cover entirely from scratch!
Fotor: Check it Out!
We’ll continue playing around with this platform, but in the meantime, we recommend you check it out and discover for yourself. Social media will only become more important and staying ahead of the pack is half the challenge!
Image credits
