The Design Academy

One of the biggest time sucks in design is “the fear”.

People get the fear over things like, font choice, colour choice, image choice.

All sorts of things that can take a 10 minute design and turn it into a 3 day odyssey that never gets finished.

Bet that sounds familiar?

There is one thing to keep in mind that can help you stop this image analysis and get creating quickly.

I have used the term social media half life before.

Social Media Half Life is the amount of time people stop seeing your posts, the amount of time it takes for your posts to disappear.

It is really fu***ng quick.

Facebook can take around 1-2 days, Linkedin is the same and Instagram maybe a week or so?

So if you are posting on facebook that design you have had for days and have tweaked to death to get “perfect” is no longer gona be seen after about 3 days?

Does it make sense to spend so much time making the perfect image for something that won’t get seen for any length of time?

I always go for good enough.

Is this image good enough for my post, we don’t need perfection due to the speed at which social media moves.

Go for “good enough” and not “perfect” and you will design faster, with less stress and much more freedom.

One of the easiest and most cost effective ways to generate sales online is email marketing.

It is cheap, non time intensive, you can set it up in advance and schedule a series of emails to go out meaning it is working for you even when you are not actively in the program.

The easiest way to get an email address to market is to create a lead magnet that has actionable content that can help your customers overcome a problem now.

To help you with that for this week only I am designing Lead Magnets for half price at just £95

One of the most popular designs I have been doing is a "magazine" style - clean, glossy looking and very slick.

Get yours started using the link below

https://checkout.stripe.com/c/pay/cs_live_a1dRAD7DPz4agLV0FHFjRBnIJKCo9BXTxvKXtH26qIRqUGTCanFvUwFjJT %2FYScpJ3VpbGtuQH11anZgYUxhJz8nNTViNTd1M25JPW5jYWJcMnZ%2FJyknd2BjYHd3YHdKd2xibGsnPydtcXF1dj8qKmZtYGZuanBxK3Zxd2x1YCtmamgqJ3gl

Once you have paid using the above link we will jump on a call and start the design process.
Design should take no more than 5 Business days and includes social media graphics to help you promote your lead magnet

Boom, a 2 in 1:D

Thank you

Can’t harp on about this enough but people are ZOMBIFIED when they are looking at social media on their phones.

They truly have zoned out and are totally on autopilot.

Look at people in the bars, cafes, waiting rooms, buses they are on there phones and are very rarely looking for anything.

They are looking to be entertained, or looking for something interesting to read to kill the 5/10 minutes whilst they wait for their friend, the bus, the coffee etc etc etc.

Now look at your social media feeds.

How much of the content on there has thumbstopping imagery?

How much of the content just blends into the background noise?

There are so many people on social media shoouting to be heard that you need to stand out, 0.5 second is all you have before someone flicks past your content

0.5 secs to make someone's thumb stop on your content.

Do it with an image then let your content speak when they have stopped.

Slay those zombies and give them something to make them feel human!

The never endless drive for perfection when designing images for social media.

You know what I mean?

The constant tinkering that takes a 15 minute design into a 3 hour journey of self discovery………..

Find out how to kill the perfection monster here

https://www.crus**twithcanva.com/good-enough-is-the-new-perfect/

Archivo black as a heading and Archivo narrow as the body text.

Works nice for leaflets/flyers and ebooks.

I have used this combination lots over the years!

One of the biggest time sucks in design is “the fear”.

People get the fear over things like, font choice, colour choice, image choice.

All sorts of things that can take a 10 minute design and turn it into a 3 day odyssey that never gets finished.

Bet that sounds familiar?

There is one thing to keep in mind that can help you stop this image analysis and get creating quickly.

I have used the term social media half life before.

Social Media Half Life is the amount of time people stop seeing your posts, the amount of time it takes for your posts to disappear.

It is really fu***ng quick.

Facebook can take around 1-2 days, Linkedin is the same and Instagram maybe a week or so?

So if you are posting on facebook that design you have had for days and have tweaked to death to get “perfect” is no longer gona be seen after about 3 days?

Does it make sense to spend so much time making the perfect image for something that won’t get seen for any length of time?

I always go for good enough.

Is this image good enough for my post, we don’t need perfection due to the speed at which social media moves.

Go for “good enough” and not “perfect” and you will design faster, with less stress and much more freedom.

I create images for attention as opposed to branding.......

ie to get people to read my posts :D

By all means use your branding in your posts but every now and again drop in something different.

Reason being is that people tune out to colours and fonts that look similar.

So if they have seen a number of your posts in one style then people can and will flick past.

I call it a hand gr***de, drop it onto your social feeds and see what it blows up for you.

I won't be using bright neons in every post, but I will be using them.......mixing it up is good for your feed

Is your Canva designing having you running around in circles?

The biggest mistake I see is people not having their Canva workspace set up correctly.

Everything is all over the place and as a result, their images are too.

There is no consistency and their audience is confused and are not liking and commenting with any consistency.

The result?

There are missed sales and opportunities all over the place.

I have a £99 Canva set up process, specifically designed to sort this out.

Here is what I do...

I login to your Canva account (set up a temp password) and I get to work optimising everything for your business to make sure you can work fast.

Everything is where it needs to be, all your colours, logo's, fonts, image folders etc etc.

And you don't have to do any of it!

Makes life so much easier and helps massively speed up your designs and organise your workflow.

Canva is super easy to use IF you have set everything up properly.

Canva should be an asset helping you to increase your social media engagement & generate sales - not be a burden on your time.

Message me and let me help you turn Canva into an asset and stop it bleeding time out from under you.

The never endless drive for perfection when designing images for social media.

The problem with perfection is it can never be attained, it is always just out of reach.

The other major thing here is, there are so many people talking, posting, sharing & commenting on social media that after a few days?

The majority of our posts are now on the shelf, never to be seen again, lost in social media purgatory.

Why spend that 20 mins, or hour or even days perfecting that image when it will be forgotten about fairly quickly?

Stop stressing and start producing, good enough is the new perfect.

Get it designed and get it posted, if its taking too much time and your endlessly tweaking?

Kill that image and don't go back to it.

Cos it's taking up far too much brain space.

Think I'm wrong and I am talking out my ass?

Don't post for a week and see how many people notice and ask if you are ok?

Good enough is the new perfect.

PS stare at the skulls for 30 secs

Superb, thank you mate

3 STEPS TO CREATE IMAGES WHEN YOU ARE STRUGGLING

Stuck for ideas on what image would be right for your post?

This happens to me all the fu***ng time (especially for my own stuff) and is very frustrating.

Quick Tip -

1. Do a google image search on what you are looking to do. Have a gander at all the madness that gets thrown up!

2. Go for a 5-10 minute walk and listen to music, or do something that totally takes your mind off it.

3. Sit down and create

After I have looked at some images on the google search, then go a walk I almost always sit down and smash it.

What is Social Media Half life and how will it help you create more content for social media?

Check it out here

https://www.crus**twithcanva.com/how-social-media-half-life-will-help-you-kill-your-fear-of-designing/

What is the difference between a meme and an infographic?

I can make this fairly easy.

If the text on what you are trying to convey is more than 25 words long its a fu***ng infographic………..

I like to keep the text on my memes short and snappy with an accompanying image to help develop an idea.

An infographic will help you convey the whole idea and is generally text heavy.

Infographic Example - Top 10 tips to Create Social Media Graphics

Meme Example - one of the 10 tips (you can get 10 memes out of this…..)

So a meme is a very small part of the story and the infographic is a whole chapter or the full story.

I use memes to repurpose old social media posts to produce small bite sized pieces of information that helps our audience understand us and our business better which, whilst getting engagement, helps your audience to know, like and trust you.

I also use memes to introduce new posts. I try to use them as thumb stoppers to stop people scrolling past the post and take the time to stop and read.

Both examples will have less than 25 words of text and are fleshed out using text in the accompanying post.

My clients also use memes when they don’t have the time to write out a whole new post and post up a meme to help keep their profiles/pages/groups ticking over. These generally get less engagement unless they are a controversial subject or graphic.

I use infographics to repurpose whole posts where I can break the post down into 5-10 sections and use these as the basis of an infographic.

Infographics are generally stand alone pieces and should need little text to help support them.

At the same time I produce far more memes than infographics (both for myself and my clients) as they are wuicker and easier top make. And crucially if you had a feed full of infographics it makes for too much reading and people will f**k it off.

Does this help?

Doe this make a difference to you in your day to day life?

Not really, but it makes me happy to know I have covered it.

If you dont know your serifs from your san serifs, this article is for you.

The language that has been built around fonts/typefaces is confusing as f**k.

So here is the Crush Your Social Media Using Images font/typeface breakdown featuring Serif, sans serif, scipt and display typefaces

SERIF TYPEFACES

Small decorative strokes that are added to the end of a letter's main strokes. Serifs improve readability by leading the eye along the line of type. Serif typefaces are most often used for body copy in print documents, as well as for both body text and headlines online

Within the serif classification, there are many sub-types.

Old Style Serifs like Adobe Jenson, ITC Berkeley Oldstyle, and Goudy Old Style
Transitional Serifs like Times New Roman, Baskerville, and Americana
Neoclassical & Didone like Didot, Marconi, and Bodoni
Slab Serifs like American Typewriter, Rockwell, and Soho
Clarendon Serifs like Bookman, Clarendon, and Ni**od
Glyphic Serifs like Albertus, Cartier Book, and Friz Quadrata

SANS SERIF TYPEFACES

A type face that does not have serifs. Generally a low-contrast design. Sans serif faces lend a clean, simple appearance to documents. Sans-serif typefaces are often more modern in appearance than serifs

Grotesque like Venus, Monotype Grotesque, and News Gothic
Neo-Grotesque like Helvetica, San Francisco, and Roboto
Humanist like Tahoma, Verdana, Calibri, and Trebuchet
Geometric like Gotham, Avenir, and ITC Avant Garde
SCRIPT TYPEFACES

Script typefaces are based upon handwriting. They are generally used for display or trade printing.

There are 2 types of script typeface

Formal- The letters in their original form are generated by a quill or metal nib of a pen like Kuenstler Script and Snell Roundhand
Casual- Casual scripts show a less formal, more active hand. The strokes may vary in width but often appear to have been created by wet brush rather than a pen nib like Brush Script, Kaufmann and Mistral
Generally, I hate script fonts as they can be really hard to read - I try to avoid these like at all costs.
DISPLAY TYPEFACES

Display typefaces are probably the broadest category and include the most variation.
The main characteristic is that they’re unsuitable for body copy and are best reserved for headlines or other short copy that needs attention drawn to it.
Like we would use in social media images……

Some examples include Bauhaus, Horizon and Neuland

So now we all know, we know and we can all sound smart and pompous when discussing fonts/typefaces :D .

Millions and millions (billions??) of people are active on social media every day.

They are all competing for your attention, whether that is your friends, family, advertisers or marketers.

They are all notification junkies desperate to get there next fix.

Please like my s**t!! Comment!! Share!!

Millions of people competing to get your attention.

I use thumb stopping social media images to get peoples attention.

With so many people now competing for your audiences attention, so should you

Happy Monday facebook, lets get on it!

How can I find content to create Social Media Images?

The best way to do this and the quickest way is to REPURPOSE what you have already written.

You can torture yourself to come up with witty quotes and funny one liners then torture yourself how it should look (I will cover templates another day).

F**k that.

We want the content for our Social Media Images to be easy, otherwise we won’t take the time to make them, right?

So go to an old post you have written, it does not matter if it got great engagement or it bombed.

Just pick a fu***ng post.

Read it over and pick some text, cut and paste it to another document and repeat till you have got 12 or so.

Try and keep your text less than 25-30 words or its gona be too much to comfortably fit in a meme, trust me here - I have tried and they always bomb. Badly

It might take 2 or 3 posts to do this but take the time to do it in BATCHES so you have a few to work with.

Boom!

You now have the content for 12 Social Media Images.

A word of warning here, I used to take ages worrying about whether it was the right sentence, has it been spelled correctly, is it punctuated nicely.

Doing this will add so much more time and add needless stress to your day.

Just pick 12.

Once you have had 30 or so Social Media Images go live you will have a better idea of what your audience responds to.

Then you can concentrate on finding text that helps your audience understand you and your business better.

But baby steps first. Get some text……...

Good luck and get cracking, any questions???

Winter is not coming

Read that nearly 200 Australians died crossing the road staring into their phones.

Pretty sure that will be replicated worldwide…..

People get on their phones and tune the f**k out!!

I have made a formula to describe this phenomenon

Mobile Phones + Social Media = Zombies

So you can see (its now a fu***ng formula peoples) mobile phones combined with social media will turn you into a zombie.

Meaning you are more likely to do something stupid….

It is our duty to cure the zombie phenomenon by producing high quality social media images that stop people zoning out……

Social Media Images that make people stop and think.

Do it, save lives with your social media images today.

This is a quick work thru of the 2 methods I use for content creation.

One uses your existing content and the other shows how I create making fresh content.

Check it out

https://www.crus**twithcanva.com/2-ways-i-use-memes-in-my-business/

The 2 Rules that I do not break when designing images for social media

(and when I do, I regret it big time)

1. Use BIG, CHUNKY text - having to squint and struggle to read text usually means people f**k off quick. Make sure you use a font that can be easily read. Do not use a fancy pants POS font that is a nightmare to read. BIG and CHUNKY is sexy as f**k, remember that.....

2. Use contrasting colours - if your background is dark, use a light font and vice versa. Do not pick a colour scheme that blends into each other as it can be confusing to understand.
And if people get to confused they f**k off quick, and we do not like that!

Short and sweet tonight but it will mean more people can see and read your images which will mean more likes, shares and comments!

How do I use memes in my business??

The more I talk to people the more that ^^^ question comes up.

The biggest worry or fear is that people have nothing funny to say and no decent images to put to it.

Let’s reframe what a meme is for a sec.

I think (rightly or wrongly), that a meme is a piece of text with a pic behind it.

Does it have to be funny, no. Does it have to be uber meaningful and life changing, no.

All a meme does is allow you to present a small piece of text in a way that stops people flicking past it on your social media and allows them to get a quick insight into your world.

There are 2 ways to do this

Go through your best content and get the best parts (short and snappy) of that information and put it in a meme ie repurpose your best stuff.
Use them as post headers (Like I have done in this post) to stop people and signal to them that there is something worthy of reading.

Try it, use canva or one of the other free design apps.

Who gives a f**k if it looks “bad”, get some text put a pic behind it.

The pic can be

- Relevant to the text
- Funny
- Outrageous and used as a pattern interrupt
- Something you like (if you like it other people will too)

It’s not that hard and most people over think themselves into inactivity when they start to do memes.

Just make one get it online and see what happens.

PS Memes is pronounced meems not mems!!!

REASONS WHY YOUR IMAGES SUCK #1

Are your images all washed out???

Increase saturation on your images to breath some colour, life and depth into them.

No one wants to see an image with the life sucked out it! Your images will not stand out if the colours are wishy washy.

Get bold and make sure they fu***ng POP!