Step 1: Choose a Background
A well-chosen background is essential to a great graphic. After all, your background gets more visual real estate than any other part of your design—plus, the right one will tell your audience what to expect from your content.
For our purposes, there are two main types of backgrounds: images and solid colors.
IMAGES
Be picky when looking for a background photo. According to Neil Patel, randomly chosen stock photos get the fewest social shares of any type of blog visual. So, make sure the one you pick accurately represents your topic or theme.
It should evoke the right emotions and associations—which you can identify using the principles of design.
For example, if you need a visual for a blog post called “37 Mental Tricks for Instant Serenity,” you might look for pictures that incorporate horizontal lines, organic shapes, cool colors, some white space, and strong visual symmetry. Each of these elements evoke a sense of calm—an emotion that lines up perfectly with your topic.
This mountain range image would be a great choice.
Where to Find Images
You probably don’t want to scale a mountain and buy a fancy camera just to snap a shot for your blog post. Luckily, there are lots of resources for free high-quality stock photos.
- Albumarium has thousands of beautiful images for private and commercial use. It’s especially good for non-cheesy pictures of people.
- Death to the Stock Photo is an email newsletter that sends 10 new images in your inbox every month. The picks are curated for creatives, so there’s a lot of office and work-life pictures.
- Unsplash adds 10 new high-resolution photos to their collection every 10 days. Once you’ve made an account, you can create collections, which is really handy when you need to find multiple images for a post or series. Plus, you can create a “future use” collection for all the photos that randomly catch your eye.
- Gratistography is an awesome but relatively lesser-known site for stock photos. Because it’s not hyper-popular, you don’t need to worry about seeing the image you chose pop up on eight other sites.
- New Old Stock curates vintage photos that are part of the public domain. That means you can get an old-school look, and use the images for whatever you want—no attribution required.
For a one-stop shop, check out Pexels. It currently houses more than 10,000 stock photos (including many from Unsplash, Death to the Stock Photo, and Gratistography)—plus, around 1,500 new ones are added each month. Take advantage of the powerful search filters: You can exclude a word by putting a dash before it (for example, “office -people), or search by color by including “color:” followed by the color name (for example, “office color: red”).
To learn about the latest stock photo sites, follow the Stock Photography collection on Product Hunt. Also worth bookmarking: Dustin Senos, Medium’s former head of design, keeps a running list of stock photo sources.
SOLID COLORS
Solid color backgrounds may be plainer than pictures, but they’re no less useful. After all, if you want to include multiple icons or lines of text, those elements could be overshadowed by a photo background. Solid color backgrounds, on the other hand, will draw your audience’s eyes right where you want them.
When choosing a specific color, keep in mind the “mood” each color generates. You want colors that align with both your content and brand.
Help Scout has done an excellent job with this. Its team uses on bright, monochromatic backgrounds for its visuals:
These colors feel energetic, simple, and even playful, reflecting Help Scout’s mission to make customer service delightful. Also, look how clearly solid colors set off the illustrations.
Rather than choosing colors based on their Pantone name (i.e. sky blue, violet, brick red and other color names you may be used to from paint chips or fabric samples), you should choose them by hex code.
A hex code is basically a numeric representation of a color. For example, the hex code for Pantone’s Dark Blue C is #00239c.
The benefit to hex codes is that they look the same no matter what browser, device, or display your audience is using. That’s especially important for colors you’ll be using again and again, like your brand colors.
Where to Find Colors
Google’s Color Palette includes hundreds of primary and accent colors that have been designed to work in harmony. Google recommends picking a base primary color, like “Indigo” (or #3F51B5) and using that as your main color. Then, if you want to add more colors, you can use the suggested accents.
If you already know which Pantone color you want for your design, try rgb.to. This tool lets you search for the hex code for any color in the Pantone library.
If you want to compare multiple colors to see how well they’ll look together, use Color Hex, which lets you create and save color palettes.
You should also have Coolors in your arsenal. This site randomly generates beautiful color palettes that you can either use whole-sale or adjust to your liking. Even better, it’ll create color palettes from any image you upload.
Finally, you can use Image Color Summarizer. It’s a free service that processes your image and identifies its average color hue, saturation, and value, along with the image’s most representative colors and how a human would describe them (lavender, gold, etc.). Definitely handy for getting an objective idea of how visually on-brand an image is.
Step 2: Pick a Tool
After you’ve chosen a background, it’s time to open a design tool. These apps range from fairly simple, like Pablo, to extremely powerful, like Photoshop. The tool for the job depends on how complex your graphic will be.
Pablo by Buffer is one of the most straight-forward options. You can either import your own image or choose one from Buffer’s library of 50,000 stock photos.) Since Buffer provides only three different size templates (Tall,Square, or Wide), it’s an awesome choice for social media graphics. However, if you want to customize your the dimensions of your visual, or use a solid color as your background, consider a different tool.
Designfeed, another graphics creation app, is like Pablo cranked up to 11. Upload your image, type in up to three levels of text (headline, subtitle, and button), and choose a platform-optimized size (Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc.).
The app produces several versions of your visual. If one catches your eye, you can share it instantly, save it, or tweak it to your preferences. And if you’re not digging any of the designs, just keep scrolling—Designfeed will churn out unlimited variations.
When you need an image for a tweet, try Spruce. Like the other tools, it lets you upload an image, add and style text, and download or share the result. But Spruce is specifically for Twitter, so it sizes your visuals accordingly.
Stencil offers a little more flexibility: there are 34 image size presets (including options for social media, ads, and banners), 200,000-plus free icons and graphics, and several photo filters. Oh, and Stencil lets you use solid-color backgrounds, too.
When you’re going beyond the basic graphic, Canva is a solid pick. It’s loaded with templates for almost every design imaginable—from YouTube thumbnails and Kindle Covers to Google+ photos and Tumblr graphics.
Canva has more than one million stock photos, but most of them are $1. Fortunately, you can also upload your own photos.
Unlike the other tools, Canva lets you add an endless number of photos to your visual. It’s an awesome feature for creating photo collages; plus, this feature lets you put a unique twist on images that tons of other blogs might already be using.
Piktochart is one rung up on the ladder of complexity. There are four main categories of graphics—infographics, reports, presentations, and posters—and oodles of templates for each.
You’ll probably use Piktochart most heavily for infographic creation. However, if you want to use this tool to create other visual assets (such as blog headers, social media posts, and newsletter banners), choose a template from the poster selection and give it custom dimensions.
As with Canva, you can use solid-color, patterned, or photo backgrounds. However, Piktochart offers far more free background options than Canva, a nice perk when you’re creating content on the fly.
If the other options I’ve mentioned range in functionality from bikes to motorcycles, Photoshop would be your Corvette. You can use it to design graphics, but it’s also a great tool for editing photos, designing web pages, working with video, and more.
Since Photoshop is pretty complex and comes with a steep learning curve—and starts at $10/month—I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re not interested in its other uses.
But let’s say you are. The process is the same: Upload your image, then (optionally) apply filters. This Adobe tutorial on filters will give you a good launching-pad.
If your main focus is on web design rather than photography, give Sketch a look. It’s tailored to building interface layouts and working with shapes, and might fit better with the graphic style of your site.
Step 3: Choose Your Add-ons
FONT TYPE AND STYLE
The most simple graphic imaginable is background + text.
When you’re choosing which fonts to use, there are a couple things to keep in mind: where is this graphic going to live, and which fonts will be around it?
Let’s say you’re designing a header for your email newsletter. If your newsletter uses Lucida Grande (a sans serif), you should choose a complementary font, like Garamond (a serif).
You don’t just need external consistency: it’s also important that the fontswithin your graphic don’t clash.
Look what happens when I use three clashing fonts within my email header design:
It looks pretty amateur, right?
If you don’t want to play with font pairings, pick one font and use it for all of your text. You can create visual hierarchy by making the more important text (like the headline) larger; bolding, italicizing, or underlining it; or putting it in all-caps.
Adding another font to the mix is fine, but stop at two. And if you’re not sure which fonts to pair, opt for the classic combo of serif for the headline and sans serif for the body. (You can also pick one font and see which pairings Google Fonts recommends.)
That’s what I did for this graphic. After I chose Raleway for the headline, I looked up its suggested pairs and ended up choosing Open Sans.
ICONS
When you’re trying to create a visual summary or make your design more engaging, icons work really well. But they tend to look out-of-place or busy on top of photo backgrounds, so only use them over solid backgrounds.
Some of the editing tools (like Canva, Piktochart and Stencil) have built-in icon libraries. However, if you’re using Pablo or Photoshop—or you don’t like any of the available options—there’s a few high-quality icon resources.
Noun Project, which lets download as many icons as you want for $9.99 a month (side note: you can use most icons for free as long as you give the artist credit). Alternatively, you can subscribe to Icon Finder. It’s approximately the same price, but you’re capped at 25 downloads per month.
Smashing Magazine’s free icon sets are handy as well. It takes some time to sort through the options and find an icon you can use, but they’re high-quality—and free!
MISCELLANEOUS
Surrounding your text within a geometric shape is a quick and easy way to make your design look professional.
It’s also handy when you need to make your copy more legible.
(You won’t be able to add geometric shapes in Pablo or Designfeed, so if that’s an effect you want to use, go with another tool.)
Uploading your brand logo is another option. Great designs sometimes go viral—and if you’ve created a fantastic infographic or inspiring quotable, you should get credit for it. Plus, having a discreet watermark in all of your graphics helps build visual consistency.
You might not have a transparent version of your logo. Luckily, you can create one in Photoshop or in Canva for Work.
Exploring Design Further
If you want to go further into the world of design, these resources are some of the best to help you get started:
- Design for Founders: This collection of 55+ design posts is aimed at founders, but anyone who’s just dipping their toes into design will benefit from its thorough look at web design.
- Design Pitfalls: Sign up for this free email newsletter to avoid “n00b designer mistakes.”
- Designer Mill: Get hooked up with amazing freebies, from icons and free fonts to Illustrator and Sketch templates.
- Crayon: Specifically designed for marketers, this site houses more than 20 million designs, including pricing, team, jobs, and trial pages.
- GoodUI: A compilation of 51 interface principles that lead to high conversion rates. Music to every marketer’s ears!
- Design for Startup: This compository is tailored to basic startup design needs.
You’ve done it—you know the basics of design, and are ready to start making your own great graphics. Put that together with content, and you’ll have a killer combo. Here are some other Zapier tutorials to help you craft content, make graphics, and turn them into blog posts and books.
- Write faster and format your text with Markdown
- Create reports for your content with these great report and chart apps
- Craft content and tweak it with your team with these collaborative writing apps
- Build an editorial calendar, then turn them into an eBook with our guide to publishing content
