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Surely you have heard a thousand times that “content is king”, right?
However, there are many people who do not fully understand this statement and focus on developing texts, texts and more texts, forgetting the design of striking images that catch the reader from the first moment.
Therefore, we agree that “content is king”. But this includes all kinds of content. A content marketing strategy should also consider the images, videos, infographics, podcasts or even the ebooks that you offer.
I don’t want to say that you “should” include all these formats in your strategy (that wouldn’t make sense either, if they don’t suit the type of content you can offer), but I do think that you should take into account other formats beyond pure text and Lasted. A good example of this is taking care of the design of images with which you accompany these texts.
“Transmitting messages in a visual way favors a direct connection with users and one of the best ways to make your content enjoyable and pleasant is to include beautiful images (especially at the beginning).”
Do you dare to learn how to design images that convey the message you want to get across?
For example, and to give you an idea of its importance, whenever I launch a new publication, I first make sure that the featured image (or cover) has an impact and conveys the main idea at first glance.
Surely you have seen a lot of cover images on networks with different attractive elements and styles: from vector illustrations, with a single representative element, to high-quality photographs, with headlines that combine different fonts.
And have you ever wondered how these featured images are achieved or designed?
Well, I confess that, in reality, achieving a result similar to that of a design professional (although not the same, of course), is easier than you think.
I encourage you to continue reading this post so that you can work on your strategy to take it to the next level. We will see:
- Online and advanced tools for image design.
- 100% recommended image banks.
- Up to 5 essential tips to create beautiful photos for your posts.
4 Tools for designing images online
Devoting yourself to designing your own cover images can feel a bit overwhelming at first, especially if you’re inexperienced with retouching or graphic design tools.
In fact, companies and entrepreneurs with sufficient resources end up needing the support of an externally subcontracted freelance professional.
But, if what you want is to be able to get by with something nice for your posts, don’t worry about that now, I assure you that we have more and more options to create designs online!
This is one of the most popular online tools among bloggers and amateur designers. It is a free tool, which presents a multitude of options and templates that can be easily adapted to your needs.
Canva was one of the first tools of this type to appear and, little by little, it has evolved to provide a very complete portfolio of services in terms of custom image design.
With it, you can design everything from cover images, which I talk about so much in this article, to infographics, personalized postcards, and book or magazine covers.
In addition to the multitude of formats that it offers when working, it also has a wide catalog of predesigned templates, which are very easy to modify and customize.
It is a tool that emerged to create infographics quickly and easily. However, its popularity has made Piktochart evolve, and a lot!
Now, in addition to , it allows you to create presentations, flyers, posters and reports. In the section to create posters, there are different options of sizes and templates, which also allows you to create images for the covers of your posts.
Piktochart has a Premium option, which offers a very large number of templates and formats, which you can adapt to your needs.
The free option has very limited options when it comes to templates. However, if you are good at designing and have creativity, you can also create good images from scratch.
This is Adobe’s flagship free tool. They launched it a little over a year ago and since then, it has been gaining a lot of loyal fans.
Adobe Spark is one of the easiest to use and has many preset options that will make your job easier.
It is a tool designed precisely to facilitate the work of bloggers and community managers, so its formats include all those for social networks and blogs.
Spark layouts have text as their main focus, so they are ideal if you want to include the title of the post or something similar in the cover image.
Pixlr is an online image editor very similar to Photoshop or other paid tools. It is not as complete as the previous ones, but it has many internal tools that will make it easier for you to design cover images.
It is not as easy to use as the other tools we have seen, since it is somewhat less intuitive. However, it will appeal to those who have previous knowledge of image editing, since it allows you to work quickly and online without having to install a complete program.
3 Advanced image design tools
The online tools that we have seen before are very good for beginners, but if you have the support of a graphic design professional or have somewhat more advanced knowledge, I recommend you go one step further.
“Think that tools like Adobe Spark, or any other free version, do not allow you to fully customize and, sometimes, are somewhat limited.”
So, if you want to go a little further, you will surely prefer one of the advanced tools that we are going to see next.
The programs in the Adobe suite are almost certainly among the most popular among designers and marketers. All of us, before or after, have tried to retouch an image in Photoshop with more or less resolution, for the design of our images.
The programs in this package are for professionals, although you can find many tutorials on the Internet that will help you learn how to handle them.
The most prominent are:
- InDesign: it is designed to design and layout pages of an editorial product.
- Illustrator: As you can imagine, it is focused on creating illustrations.
- Photoshop: the jewel in the crown, designed to retouch and modify images.
All 3 allow you to export and import files from other programs, so using them in parallel, you can achieve great designs for your cover images for posts and digital content.
You can also consider taking a course to learn about the Adobe world. Of course, if you have never done any design before, they will be a bit overwhelming. My recommendation here is that you take it easy and go little by little.
It is a professional photo and image editing software. It stands out for being one of the few that does not require a monthly subscription, but can be purchased through a single payment.
It has more than 40 different tools to design the cover images of your articles and can process practically all types of files.
In fact, it works directly with many camera files, which are not supported by other programs.
It is available for both iOS and Windows, but there is no version compatible with other operating systems yet.
Among the most popular advanced tools, this is one of the easiest to use. It is much more intuitive than the others and this does not detract from its power and possibilities in image design.
Pixelmator is for Mac, and it has many functions that are perfectly adapted to this operating system and its own characteristics.
In addition to retouching images, it also has options to create illustrations from scratch, design images based on typography, or add optical effects.
Where to find images for your covers?
You already have information about tools and programs with which you can make your own images for the covers of your posts.
Surely now the following logical question arises; “Where do I get the resources to create those designs?”
That is precisely what we are going to talk about now, image banks that you can use to download royalty-free resources that will be very useful to you.
- : This is a free image bank that, although it is not one of the most complete, has very good quality photographs. All of them are royalty free and can even be used for commercial purposes.
- : a free bank specializing in vectors and illustrations. It also contains photographs, but its catalog is much smaller than that of other similar web pages.
Every day they publish new free vector graphics developed by the Freepik team itself, apart from all the material that users may upload.
- : It is one of the best free image banks. The content they offer is always of high quality and, although they are not like Premium banks, you can get professional resources.
- : is a bank of icons and buttons. It may not seem relevant at first glance, but when it comes to editing an image and customizing it to meet the standards of your blog, it will come in handy to have such a tool. They have thematic packs that follow the same aesthetic, but also with loose icons and buttons that can solve more than one situation.
- : This is one of the payment image banks that we are going to see. It is the “little brother” of Getty, a version adapted to all pockets and with a tighter catalog. While Getty offers all kinds of materials, iStockphoto focuses on quality photos accompanied by some vectors and illustrations.
- : It is one of the most popular among designers, bloggers and other professionals related to image and communication. It has one of the best and most complete catalogues, and all the resources it offers are of the highest quality.
- : It is Adobe’s image bank, and with the license of some of its programs you can get a pretty good subscription.
It is also associated with WordPress and other blogging tools.
Tips for designing images for your posts
With clear resources and a selection of tools to design cover images for your posts, the time has come to start creating.
How you decide to style these images is up to you. Nobody better than you knows the public and the readers of your blog. In addition, you must adapt the images to the written content and to…
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