Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey guys. In this class we are going to be covering how to create those adorable social media templates, device wallpaper, and story icons that you can use for your highlights and they just bring a little bit of seamless branding, a little bit of style. These are tokens of gold for engagement. They're becoming more and more popular as more people are sitting and scrolling their feed, they still want to interact. Give them a screenshot that's going to let them. Not only can you use these for your personal brand, but you can also create a whole suite of them and sell them on places like Creative Market and Design Cuts and your FC shop, your website. Do not worry if you are normally an analog worker, a computer worker, or a digital tablet worker, we're going to be going over all of these things in multiple different ways. In Photoshop, in Procreate, and also with additional software that you can use for free to get your analog images beautifully showcased on screen. We're going to get into all of that. It's going to be super fun. I'm Peggy Dean, I am an artist, an author, an educator. Let's come together, let's create some fun graphics. Here we go.
2. Why Create Digital Graphics?: Welcome to the class. The first thing that I want to talk to you about is why we're creating this stuff. I know I mentioned it briefly, but the reason why this is such a great aspect to add to your brand, it doesn't matter how small your business is, or how large your business is, this is always a win. People love polls, they love surveys, they love chain letters from fifth grade. Am I right? Yes. The answer is yes. Basically, what I want to share with you is ways that you can interact with your audience, ways that you can build engagement, ways that you can be recognizable, even to people that didn't know that you existed. When people share these images, your handle's on them, they want to play too. They want to play the game. While there are a handful of types of graphics, we're going to be focusing on device wallpaper. We're going to to doing some Instagram story highlight icons, and then Instagram story templates. These three things are of great value to your audience, your followers, and for some engagement reach, and a little bit of boost, as we just discussed. Typically, I just wanted to give you some numbers really quickly. We're going to get into it. I'm going to relay this again. But when it comes to creating a canvas or a template, I just want to make it clear that we can do this digitally, we can do it analog. It doesn't matter, as long as your end result is the right dimensions. So we're jumping in, don't worry about a thing, I got you. But for quick numbers, a phone icon, if you can keep in the 1080 by 1920 pixel size, that will be ideal. Then the opposite goes for desktops, so just 1920 by 1080 does the trick. Keep those numbers in mind as we dive in. I'll also share a couple additional numbers as we get into this, but that's what we're going to know. Don't worry if you're analog or not, we are going to cover it all.
3. Wallpapers for Phones: When you're creating Instagram stories, you will want to make sure that your canvas size is correct, and this is basically the main thing to keep in mind as you're working on anything new when it comes to creating templates and such. Usually, when people are looking to create their own social media device, wallpapers or templates for stories, or any interactive stuff like that, it is in the story format. Whether you're using Photoshop or whether you're cropping a photo to a certain size, formatting it or working in Procreate, this is going to be the same across the board. You're going to go to, the width is 1080 by 1920. Those are your dimensions that you want to work with to make sure that it shows up the way that you want it to on screen. Resolution, I always just keep it to 300. Some people do not get down to 72 since it's only on screen, but I just never do. That's my reason. I'm going to say create and that's going to create this vertical skinny portrait type of canvas. Now you can scan in your artwork. If you scanned it in, you can place it however you want to. As an example, I can pull in, let's just go to an artwork, let's go to water color, if I can find it, paint, lots of folders here. Let's just choose something that covers more area. Actually, this would work. Let's say I wanted to make this into a wallpaper, all I would have to do is pull it over and then I can adjust it however I want to. This one's easy because it keeps a white background. You might also want to transform it to make it larger, and you can do that before you set it, you can drag and release and then set it in place or you can, if you've already set it and you want to transform it, just press "Command T" on your keyboard or "Control T" if you're on a PC and then you can resize it. Essentially, that's how you would make a wallpaper and then just save it as a JPEG and then you are set, and then you could just export that, send it to whoever. We'll talk about export setting soon. But it's really simple to create a wallpaper. I'll show you just another one. Let's say, it's a gouache piece, I'll pull in this one here. Let's say I want this one to be one of my wallpapers that I offer, and I want it to be more colorful and take up the whole screen, and that's what it would look like as a phone wallpaper or background or whatever. Then the icons would be over that, and it would be quite lovely. Using Procreate's going to allow you to draw digitally, which makes things really easy. It also makes things easy because you can just create a canvas right away that's the correct size. You can see I have down here IG story. If you want to make these often, what I would recommend, so you probably know this at this point at the bottom you see untitled canvas here. That was a canvas that I made quickly and then I didn't name it but I needed it for something. But as you probably know, in Procreate, it automatically creates or it saves the canvas sizes that you're using, so you can always go and if you're going to use it a lot, just rename it, and then it's right there for you, it makes it really easy. To do that, you would just open your new canvas and then you can just select the untitled canvas and rename that, make the width the same for phone wallpapers, which is 1080 width by 1920, and then I usually just save. From there I say, "Create," but then I didn't end up renaming that, but that's what's going to pop up. You can see that once it's named, that's going to pull up the exact same because it's the same dimensions that I put in. You can draw directly on that and we're going to talk about fun templates and whatnot. But let's say you have a piece of artwork that you already love. Let's say I want to use one of my bananas here, I can share it as a JPEG to my iPad, and then just import that image. This would look like this. Imported, I can stretch it. You could also fill the background if you don't want to enlarge it. But then I have this really fun banana wallpaper. Another way to do that though, is let's say you have a flat image somewhere, so I've created this IG story size, but then I want to take an artwork and I don't want to have to render it or export it to my gallery. I can actually just swipe to the right on all of these. There's only three layers on this one, so it makes it really easy, and then I just take my finger and I hold on to those three and then grab them right here. I'm still holding onto them while I press gallery with my other hand, and then I get out of my peppers by pressing "Peppers," and then I go, see I'm still holding this, into untitled artwork or it would be IG story and then I drop it. Then you might have to rearrange the layers, but otherwise, it puts all those layers on the new canvas, which is so handy, and then you don't have to keep saving and importing. This is an example of when I would have to fill the background more, so I could either just go to the background layer and stretch it, or if you have everything flat, you could just sample that color, and then drag and color fill or change the background color however you want to do, it just makes it streamline for you. That's the other way to do that. When you just want to create a beautiful wallpaper, Procreate makes it real handy. The access like of having Photoshop or Procreate to make these easy canvases, if you go to canva.com, you can sign up for a free account and it will do so much work for you. It's an incredible website, especially for people who aren't designers or can't afford expensive software. They even have these templates for you which you can totally use and that's really fine, but I do recommend doing your own, it's so much fun. It's great for branding and you can make them true to your brand, and then it's also great for promotion because you can put your Instagram handle on it, which would make people come to your page if they love your template or something. You can just search IG story, and then Instagram story highlight covers, that's that same pixel size that we already talked about, 1080 by 1920. I can click on that and it'll show me all of these templates that they've already made, which is great, whatever. This is for highlight covers which we're going to go into next, but for now we just needed that size. I'm going to create a blank Instagram story. It's the same size that we talked about. Then you can go in and you can either drop your artwork into there, let's say you scanned it in so I can go into my artwork again. Let's say this time I wanted to do a lettering quote as a background, and so I grabbed one of these and I can stretch it, and let's say it doesn't fill, that's okay, because when you go into your background here, I'm selecting it and then I'm going to this color here. It's really cool because Canva pulls up your photo colors, so I can just click that and then it'll match the background which is awesome. It's just like this really easy half that Canva has which I love. The other way to do this would be to go to elements and so you can change your background color. I'm just going to stick to my brand palette. This is something that's in the pro, the account that you pay for. Totally unnecessary. You could pull in brand colors with hex codes or whatever. Let's say I want something bright, so I choose something colorful. Then you can go to elements, and they have all these shapes that you can search for, and they get more and more abstract the more you go down. Then they search terms in elements too, so I could just say imperfect, and it'll come up with all of these really fun options to use. But the other cool thing is once you use something, that's a pro one, but you can find free ones. It'll show magic recommendations like this is a free one, and I can just make these larger and just have them accent whatever is here, and then you can basically create, just with this drag and drop, your very own wallpaper, that's really interesting, and then you can click on any of these and change their color. If you want it to match your brand colors or for whatever you're using it for, basically just make your own fun highlights. That is a way to go about doing that. You can add text, you can add icons, these elements, you could look up, let's say you want like a megaphone. If you search megaphone, it's going to come up with all these options. You can see when I hover it shows pro, but then this one's free, this one's free, so that'll come with the free account. This one's pro, pro, free right here. You can drag one these in. Sometimes it'll let you change the colors of them, sometimes it doesn't, it just depends on the design, like this one. This one lets you change the colors. You can tell because up here it has these three colors and you can see there's three colors here. Let's say that you are trying to say something, you got attention, you've got this megaphone, maybe it's pointed up, and then you've got some text or something. Then you can change these to be brand colors. I'm doing this very quickly, so it's not going to look great, but you get the idea. You can basically build whatever you want within Canva. It makes it super, super handy. Quick crash course on phone wallpapers, there's many ways to do it. We'll talk about how to export and upload in just a bit. But I just wanted to show you basically a walk-through creating really fun graphics. No matter what style you're looking for, just make sure that your dimensions are 1080 by 1920.
4. Social Media Highlight Icons: You have probably seen these ads, I'm going to pull this in here so I can just show you a quick example of what I'm talking about. Let this loads any minute. These are your highlight covers. If you have a Instagram story, and you click on it, you see a hat, all these stories. If you end up pinning your stories, then you can add highlights to them. Mine are these little illustrations. Some people have them as words or just like this says free, it just depends on what you want, but you can make anything with them. I'm going to move this over, come back here, and you can make these really, really simply. You probably remember in the last segment where I showed you the default for the Instagram story highlight on Canva, and it showed you all of those graphics. This is essentially the same thing. What you're going to do is you can fill, what's going on here. The idea here is that you keep the center as the main area that you want to highlight. Let's say I can create a circle. I'll create a new layer and create a circle by going to my elliptical tool. In the center, I realized this is higher than the center, but the cool thing about highlights is that you can adjust it to whatever meets your needs. I'm going to make this smaller, get it centered and then you can say something like, let's say you love books, then you can go and add type that says books. That could be one of your highlights, and then you can make the crop larger to fill that space, and then have some of that yellow sticking out. That's just a really, really basic one. Let me show you what I did with mine in Procreate and then we'll get into Canva and how you can do it there too. As you know, the dimensions are the same, 1080 by 1920. I'm going to go down here and see if I can just find the ones that I worked on already in my giant folder here. But essentially, I just created a canvas that was the correct size. I filled the background color and I did a little doodle in the center. Let's see. We'll try this one more time and then I'll just show you. This is the thing about Procreate and it's folders, I need it to be searchable. I don't think that it's going, oh, wait, here we go. This stack, even if I said it was searchable, it wouldn't even know it because it just says stack, but anyway, these are the icons that I have on my Instagram. You can see that I have basically, I just created a 1080 by 1920. I did everything actually on the same layer and just duplicated it and changed colors and so how I wanted that to work. But initially, I had just done one layer and just turned off a graphic and turned on another and changed the layer color. You can do this however you want. One of the things that I did to help me was I imported some of my brand colors over here and these were the colors that I initially had until I expanded into, I wanted some more green in there, but that was helpful. It's just a hidden layer and then I was able to grab from those colors and then fill the background with those colors instead. I wanted mine just to be playful, so I have my pens, I have learning section, my books. I don't think I have those as highlights anymore, but then I have Q&A, paint brushes, just some fun highlights of my dogs and my cats because, who doesn't love seeing that? This little picture of me waving, that's for my in real life, stuff that's not necessarily art related, but I was sharing. Bottom-left here is this little icon, that's action. This is for behind the scenes, my travel freebies and then I had another version of freebies I was testing out to see which one I wanted. This is how I created them. Basically, they were just made so that, I'll show you on my Instagram, are displayed, they are centered. You can edit that or zoom in or zoom out. I'll show you that when we get into uploading. But basically, you can see this is where they popped up. I have my books, I guess I didn't pin that or highlight that. In real life, I did cut off that illustration, but it is because when it was smaller, it wasn't very legible that it was just me waving, so I made it a little larger. So you have creative freedom here. They can look like anything. Some people have patterns on each one of them. They don't have to represent what they are because you have this text to do that for you. It's really up to you how you want to create that. Now, I'll show you Canva version. If I go back over here, I'm going to exit out of this one. Well, actually, yeah, I'll exit out because we want to look at templates too. Make this a little smaller so that I can fit this into the screen and you get to see what is going on. Again, I recommend doing this on your own and that one that we just walked through together to make as a wallpaper, anything like that is going to be great. But if you do want to browse theirs, you can look at IG story, pull out the highlight covers and look at all their templates. These could be used as inspiration even. I really like this minimal line over a circle. It was the idea with the Photoshop one, that I was just showing you super quickly. But you can see some people just do these little graphic shapes and you can find every element that you see here is in Canva. If you were building from scratch and you looked up elements, you're going to find all these shapes depending on your search terms. You could use what you see and just change them to your brand colors, or you could use them as reference points of starting off. You want to make sure that basically, it's the center being used and you'll be able to zoom out as far as the edges on the right and left side. You want to make sure that nothing goes higher, like if it's a circle, the circle wouldn't want to go up here because then it would be cut off. So you don't want that to happen. That's really all you have to think about when you're doing those highlight as you're creating these. That being said, I want to jump into desktop wallpapers as you are wanting to create those. Because oftentimes, let's say you offer wallpapers to your followers in addition to those phone wallpapers that we discussed earlier, having an accompanying desktop or laptop wallpaper is just a nice addition.
5. Wallpapers for Desktops & Laptops: But when it comes to desktop sizing, you're going to find different sizes all over the place. When we go into Canvas, you'll see they have their standard as 1920 by 1080. If you're offering wallpaper, they will fit, and look nice, and clean, and crisp. I've seen them upwards of 5120 by 2880, I actually prefer to just stick to the middle of 2560 by 1440. This is standard for larger format and smaller format. When you create these, you might be creating them for yourself, but if you are creating them for other people, or as a download, or freebie, or for sale, or whatever you want to do with them, I don't do other screen sizes other than device sizes. I'll do iPad, I will do desktop, and I will do phone wallpaper. The only difference is the designs are the same, they're just put on a different Canvas sizes to create for optimal viewing because you don't want something cropped off if you're trying to make it a beautiful full screen backdrop. Let's say, I'm making one with patterns, I can bring my art back in here, I can look at one of my patterns. Let's go with this guy. When you bring one in, you might find that it cuts off. What I can do is, I can create a repeat. If you have no idea or aware and know how to make repeats, actually this one's not a repeat tile, I need the repeat tile to make it work. Here we go. Then I just duplicate it and then drag it over, and it snaps into place. You can turn that on or off, but then, I have a repeat. I don't think this one's actually finished, let's do one that is finished, and one that might be a little more difficult to align. I can show you guys how I do that, that'll make things easy. I have swatches, here's my swatch. This one is here and will work for us. There we go. Now, I could make this smaller and make the repeat by lining everything up or do for that is, I'm just going to open this file here so that it will open in its own perfect square. Why is this not working? I'm going to do this a different way. You can exit out of here, not going to save it. Then, I'm just going to drag this, and because I already know this is my perfect swatch, so from here, I'm going to go up to Edit in the Photoshop menu, go down to Define Pattern, and then I just want to name this. I can get rid of all this. I'll just say is SmithTub-flowers, and that's going to save it in my patterns, and I'll show you what we'll do now. I'm just going to default to 1920 by 1080 because really, it is a perfectly adequate size for wallpapers on the computer, so I'm going to go there, and then what I'm going to do, I'm just going to leave this blank, go up to Edit and say Fill. You can scale that down to exactly the size that you want it to be for your wallpaper and go from there. If I was to create this for a desktop, I could do it in this form and then also create one for a phone which is the opposite. It's the 1080 by 1920, and then I could export those and have like a package of them for all devices and iPad as well. That's a fine way to go about doing that. I'll show you the same thing in Procreate. Let's say that I want to take one of these illustrations and turn it into a desktop wallpaper. I'm just going to share the image, say JPEG, and just makes things easy. Of course, I can also do the thing where you pull the layers over to a new Canvas size, but this is what I'm doing for now. Little cheat, if you didn't know, you can go in and change the dimensions. Like this is the 1080 by 1920, just rotating it changes that to 1920 by 1080 and it remembers that. When inside this photo, I'm going to drag it over here, and then I can just take a sample from this color, and then go into my background color. It looks like I didn't take that, there we go. Now, I can change my background color. It looks like that actually because I grabbed the wrong swatch. Here we go. Now it matches. Then here, a lot of people will keep their icons in this region or in this region. Then, you can go in and say, January 2021, and then have a calendar. This is going to be incorrect, but you get it. Then you have this beautiful wallpaper that somebody can put on their desktop. That's about it. We'll get into exporting and uploading in just a hot second.
6. Social Media Template: Year In Review: Now I want to walk through some fun projects that you can create. That you can provide as a template or you can create as your own. But templates are so fun to share on social media, and you can have your handle on them. As people use them in their story, they will usually tag back onto where to find the templates, which is your page, or your feed, so that's really ideal for you. Let's talk about creating your own template. The first one that I want to do is remember, these are all the 1080 by 1920, and that, I clicked on the wrong thing. Here we go, perfect. I am going to do a year in review. These are so much fun. You can add type to the top or you can do it at hand-drawn. The key elements that I really love playing with in these templates, especially if you make a whole bunch of them, just as a quick overview. We're going to do like one or two, maybe five, I don't know. A year in review, like favorite items, bingo challenges maybe, this or that, fun games to play in social media on these templates. My favorite thing to do is to determine what my color palette is going to be across the board, so they look branded and they all look like me. You might find like you really love to use a peachy background. I'm typically a peachy background person, maybe that'll be my background color. You can make this your actual background color. You don't have to create a new layer for it, I just tend to because I am in the habit of working with a lot of layers. But then from there, for a year in review, you could just do some little doodles. By the way, I'm working in Procreate. You can work in Canva, you can work in Photoshop, you can work analog and then scan it in. Just make sure that your dimensions will be on par with the 1080 by 1920. From here, I can choose another color that's going to go well, so I like that color with it, and then maybe choose one more. I make color palettes where I group them together to see what might look nice together, and so that's where I'm at here. Those are fun. Maybe something a little, and that's pretty bright, but why not? That's weird, I like weird. I'm going to pick just a regular brush. I'm going to go to inking. I like dry ink a lot. Yeah, I will go with that, and then I'll just do some weird neon leaves on the side and they're not really going to have a whole lot of dimension or anything. They're just to create some fun accents on the side. Not going crazy here. We just want to make it have some added interests. That's my reminder to clean up the poop. I have that every two days so I don't forget to go outside and pick it up in the backyard. Anyway, you can just add some interest here. I'm going to just do a little framing and then call it good. I'm probably not going to lie, probably going to change these colors later on. But they're fun for now. From here, I might make this one a little bit smaller just so I have more room. I might actually just move it down and shrink. Yeah, that'll work, and then I'll shrink this one just a little bit. Obviously, the artwork that you put in here can be abstract. It doesn't have to be leaves, doesn't have to be hand-drawn, nothing like that. This is just what I'm building out as we're talking, is to give you some ideas. Then I'll do some imperfect line work that goes outside the line because I like that style and just very quick. You can see, these don't need to take a lot of time at all, and done. That seems good to me. That's good for now, and then I will take that same darker color, create a new layer and then I can say "year in review". You can do this in cute handwriting. It doesn't have to look perfect at all. You could do like the grade school cursive because it's just fun. Let's see if I can remember how to do cursive. Something like this. You could also add text. I'm just going to, year in review, and then make it fun. Make that smaller, and then I can come through and just create little lines. The lines are going to be where people fill in their answers. Actually, you know what's even more fun than those? I'm going to swap colors here I think, so I'm going to grab my background color and make that my word color and then my background color. Yeah, that's fine for now. The only reason I'm doing that is because I think it's fun to create boxes instead of lines. You can totally create lines, it doesn't matter. I just think that boxes are fun to fill in. I'm making these imperfect. They're just supposed to be fun, low pressure templates. Hand-drawn is just fun. I'm going to actually move this layer to below so the leaf overlaps it, there we go. Hand-drawn templates, they're just supposed to be fun, and honestly we're more connected to hand-drawn things anyway. That's just a fun hand-drawn template that looks totally awesome. I definitely will probably be revisiting these colors. Remember though with stories, you guys, that the top part right here and then the bottom part is going to be covered by your social icon, and then any text there, and then at the bottom, it has that little comment or respond or whatever to stories. You don't want to have anything cut off by that so you want to make sure that you put your Instagram handle somewhere that it's legible for how small it's going to be, and that it is not going to be cut off. Can make that smaller. Right turn it. Just play around. You definitely want that on there though because that is how people know that you created it and where to find more fun ones. Yeah, I don't know. I think the bottom is probably good. Then from here, you can write on the side, I'm just going to create a new layer. Let's see, Best Friend of the year, I guess. I can write them like this or I can do type. Typically when people fill these out, it's going to be in their text on their story that just is still thin. Handwriting or hand lettering, if you're a hand letter, it might be really fun to do. Let's say best friend that you have for the year, favorite trip, maybe favorite moment, what I learned. You can clean this up if you want to, this is pretty sloppy. What I learnt, and then something I taught, and then maybe, favorite project, let's say. It can be anything that you want. Those are just what came to my head right now. I did put those on a different layer so I can overlap the other part, no problem, and just make it smaller. Maybe even it out if I want to. Something I taught. You don't want to go too small though because then, it won't be legible. Also, my handwriting is pretty sloppy as we walk through this so I might want to go over that again. Cuts a little bit much. But you know what? Don't underestimate the power of handwritten. It's in, it's always going to be in. There we go. That's just something fun. Then afterwards, you can always play with the color and see if you want to change that. This probably makes a lot more sense to use. If it isn't my brand, not really. How are we going to make this work for me? That's fun, really obnoxiously fun. See, I'll play around and see what you love, see what you want to do, where you want to go with your color palette, and then what I recommend, once you figure that out, I'm still figuring out right now. Once you figured out, I recommend saving it on its own palette, or if you're doing analog work. Here we go, I like this. Saving it, writing down the colors that you're using. What I'm going to do is create a new pallet in Procreate, set that as default, come over here, sample this purple, drop it in, sample this lime, drop it in, sample the olive, drop it in. I think that's all there is. That's the year in review, and it's so much fun to create. While this is totally obviously sloppy and handwritten, when that's small on a phone, it's going to be so cute, and you can add your little tags. It's adorable, you guys don't doubt it. Don't doubt it, it's super fun. Let's move into the next design.
7. Social Media Template: Favorite Things: Now, we're going to do a fun template for favorite things, and these are some of my favorites to do, see what I did there. I could duplicate that project that I just did or I can just create a new one, it doesn't really matter. One of them you just have to clear the canvas, the other one doesn't have the same layers. Now I can drop in the colors. Remember, you don't have to drop them in the same way that you did before. Your background color could change, maybe you want to add purple leaves this time, or maybe some flowers, or blooms, or just weird abstract shapes which you'll find in Canvas. That one is a little too pointy for what I wanted. You'll find places like that just to make it fun and bubbly and cheerful. However you want to do it, there's really no right or wrong way. Make it on brand to you, make it fun. This one's pretty damn bright. Then I can grab my next color, make it outline these a little bit sloppily I like to do that. I think I'm actually going to make this background color darker, that'll make more sense, I might even go darker than that, even though it's not in my color palette, it'll still make sense, it's in the same color family and then I'm going to grab this peachy color and do favorites. Let's say these are a few of my favorite things dot-dot-dot. I'll make that smaller because I want to put more focus on the favorites so I'll just put that up here, remember to keep space at the top. I'm actually going to duplicate that word layer and then make it and drag it just a smidge to thicken that line so it's more readable. I want to change that writing because it's not super legible, but for now, I probably want I'm pretty lazy but if you want to make it beautiful than that's totally good as well, I'm actually going to make that even smaller. Now you could do the same thing where you create these boxes and say like favorite whatever, so that's what I will do, see how uneven that is, I think that's so fun I know it's like totally frowned upon as creative see when I have perfection or whatever, but not me over here I do it. I probably should have separated these little more so that I could have added more space into what I was going to write, but that's okay, I'm going to keep space here though. Actually, I don't think I'm going to add that one because I'm just going to add my handle, pigeon letters and bring it up just slightly and then I can add whatever this is going to say. I'm going to grab the pigeon letters and bring it down to right here and then I am going to add some separation in here. If you're working digitally, no matter if you're on Canvas or Photoshop you can always edit your spacing most times because if you scan something in then you can grab it. That seems goodish to me and now I can say, what these favorite things are, I can make it a different color or I could make it the same. I think I'm going to make it a different color, I'll just bring in a little bit darker or a lot a bit darker purple its still not seeing family, it's just going to be more legible. I'll say these are my favorite things, my favorite artist, my favorite craft, my favorite hobby, my favorite human, favorite animal, see, it's super fun, did I put those on the same layer didn't mean to. I'm going to undo this and I'm actually going to move it to the other side and I'm going to also make a new layer and then go lowercase with it. It's a little more playful, so artists, I don't remember what I said half of this so let's change it to food, craft, hobby and then let's say music, I forgot the rest. I'm going to show you a different way to do this anyway, so it doesn't matter and I'm going to show you a really quick way to recycle what you just did so you can make it, not as much effort. I'm going to go back to my gallery and you could do this in Photoshop if you save it, save it as a PSD, duplicate the file, open a backup and then I'm just going to rearrange these colors. I'm going to make the background this peachy color, actually I want to change this before I do that so I don't lose it. I will drag this color there, look at that fund market I didn't know it was there and then I'm going to change the background to the peachy color, I could keep the flower color the same, it's on this one here we go, how did that happen? I'm going to change it because I want it to be opposite, with that, all I'm going to do is select that layer and say flip horizontal at the bottom that you see. You could also flip vertical to see how that looks and it'll just make it super different. You can just reposition where everything else is and then you've totally switched up the canvas without having to redraw something and it looks different enough. Now I can get rid of those prompts and add new ones this I should probably darken, so I'm going to grab that one and then grab this one. If you guys if you're looking at this going like, "Wow, what are all these layers doing? How are you going about doing this?" Watch my procreate class that's going to help with a lot of those shortcuts, but because I know I'm swimming right through this. These right here are a few of my favorite things and I'm going to go a little lighter at that purple. Now I can continue so I don't know, did I write animal in the other one? I really want to know everybody's favorite animal. Let's say book, let's say at vacation, maybe TV show, maybe drink and subject in school. This could be anything you guys, maybe like favorite meduim, it could be art related, it could be like blog related, whatever you want to do. That's a fine way to set up the same thing as year end review, it's just like how you can tweak things. I could duplicate year end review and do the same thing where I take the leaves, select them, swap them horizontally, I probably should have grabbed both of those layers, yeah, horizontally, vertically and then just move things around to make it intentional, essentially, that's all you would do. Let's go into a little bit of the different design as we continue into this fine collection.
8. Social Media Template: GIFs: As you can see, I have got three at the top in my gallery in Procreate, I've got three designs that go together quite well. They're different, but they're similar because they have similar color palette, so it's already getting to be a lot of fun. The next one that we're going to do is emojis just because everybody loves making their favorite emojis. Let's say you did the same canvas size, you go to your palette. I'm going to choose this weird neon color now, we'll see how that serves me, and then I'll go in. Let's see how the peach look, kind of weird, kind of blinding. How about, purple works. This time, let's say I want to do some dangling stars that are hand drawn and just fun little additions. You can fill that. I made this really difficult by using this brush that has a lot of holes in it, so you can color it in really well like me or not. Oops, I put that right on the background. That's all right, I'm going to move that so it's more even and then I can just change my background color to match. Perfect. I've got some fun stars, maybe I want to put one more in here just so it all makes sense and that's the most minimal design ever, but it adds just enough interest to our palettes. Before I forget, I will put in my handle, pigeon letters and then I can center that. Oh, I put that right on the background too. Guys, working layers. Now I'm going to grab the lighter purple. Was that? No, I want a lighter than that, a light purple and I'm just going to draw some imperfect circles and you might want to do this where they are perfect and that's okay. I just like things to look more hand-drawn, as I've said a million times and really is not to excuse my sloppy lines, I don't know. But it's working, so it's fine. I'm actually going to flip that radically, so I have room at the top here. Emoji time, so I can move this star over and maybe move these over as well so I can write something at the top there. Let's say choose, that's too high. Remember we want to go down, choose your emoji for dot dot dot. Then make that a little bit smaller and choose your emoji, actually I think I like it bigger, for, and then you can say joy, excitement, feisty, let's say achievement. I'm going to have to move some of these over. In a perfect world, you guys, I would want to be writing these a lot cleaner, but I also don't want you to have to sit here and watch me perfect everything because first of all, I'm not going to, second of all, how boring. For joy like that, so feisty excitement achievement. Let's see, energetic and then hungry. How about there. Now you can put this up and it will just be a fun little dancing screen where people can put emojis or GIFs. Actually you could say choose your emoji or GIF, and then you can enhance your three letters. I'm laughing at my self at how bad this looks. It's fine, everything's fine, no one's judging me. You guys, usually I work with templates and clean these up quite a bit more, so this is hilarious. If nothing else, it'll make you feel better. If I can hand letter, I thought you can, choose your GIF for, but it just enhances it and makes it more hand drawn. That said, I would like to lift up these here so that it leaves more breathing room and then I might want to put a bar at the bottom. I did it on top, that's okay. I can rewrite my handle. I'm doing it here just for some separation and design because it's kind of busy. So doing this little design cut will help with the flow of things and it will really let my handle pop so that people know where they found it. That's cute, right? I don't even want to hear it. I don't want to hear it, I'm leaving it. I'm going to post this and everything. Anyway, that's a fun one, you can say emojis or GIFs or whatever and then it makes this fun in our development. Shut up.
9. Social Media Template: This or That?: All right. So now we're going to do a simple one, also one of my favorite games. By the way, I know that we're just making one or two of you chose but you can make so many of them. I would straight up love using a template that has, these are my favorite things times 10 pages of options. Because I know how valuable in fifth grade chain letters they were the thing and when I got to choose, I was so excited. Okay, so another one, it would be like this or that. So I'm going to take my same palette and I'm actually going to separate it. So I'm going to draw a line in the middle, fill one of those colors, and then fill the other side with, actually do it on a different layer underneath so that I can change them if I want to independently of one another. But now I'm going to grab my brush, then I'm going to write with text. I'm going to save this olive darker color. I'm going to save this in my really good block letters, since I've started to do block letters and this. I like that they're looking perfect, so leave them alone. I now you're not judging me. This or that. When you see stuff like this, you think it's darling. You don't know how ugly the process looks. All right. Let's do that, and then maybe like some fun question marks as your design, so I could do in neon. So that's pretty good question mark, I got to say that one wasn't it but at least it's hidden question marks. This or that, I can fill those in. Nope.Where is my opening at? That middle one has got a little bit of a problem, but no problem, no problem over here. I'm going to also add a little separation here so that I can add my handle in there and it adds just a little more to the piece itself, because otherwise it looks a little bit plane, no big deal. But actually I'm going to do it in olive, and then I'm going to add it in this lime yellow, neon yellow color. The pigeon letters. I'm going to grab the olive again doing a layer, this or that. Let's say, mountains, I'll make this a little more legible. Note, no-taking writing Peggy, mountains or ocean. Let's do tea or coffee, and then we could say, let's go painting or drawing. Digital or analog. I mean, we're all in the arts here. So it's analogue. It's fun to fill this stuff out, and let's see what else. Mountains, ocean, tea, coffee. I could fill these things out all day long. Mountains, ocean tea, coffee painting, drawing, digital, analog. What else, guys? Let's go. Okay, juice or soda. Am really sick in the drinks. Two pillows or one pillow. Let's say, Apple or PC. Okay, so then, let's do a couple more actually. Say flowers or plants. It's hard for a lot of people. One more is good because then it fills that space. So something like this, and then that if it's on a phone is going to be small and then people can circle the one that they like. So that's fun, and so let's continue with that one. Let's do one more of those. I can go in and change the colors, and I want to change the colors opposite. So I'm going to go to this purple line, and then I'm going to go to the background and then change that to neon and then now I can't see stuff, and I turn those off real fast. Change this into that. Which means also this one got a lot of weird layers going on. My question marks. I'll make this peach color, and then the bottom part here. So you can see that, none of this is perfect by any means, but it's still fun. Then I'll take this purple color again, change the text here. So basically, you just played around a little bit with color, and I think I actually want to lighten this one quite a bit, so I'll grab that olive and then just drop in. Yeah, that's better a little. Then I can restart this and go into my next round, if you will. You guys get it. I don't need to go through this again. I just want to that's the thing. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. To show you how you can. So you can do this thing for like, have you ever make a Bingo board that people can stamp off with gifts and things like that. So these are just really fun templates, so you can host them on your own Instagram, and then provide blink templates, put a highlight on them and then create a highlight of IG templates and put a little icon for it, and then people can screenshot and share, and then your hand is all over him, and that's a great way to bring people to your feed.
10. Exporting + Pro Tip: When it comes time, let's say you have an awesome bundle, and it doesn't have to be a huge bundle. It could be two or three or one thing even. I made a year in review once, I had two slides, that was it. It went all over the place and had a lot of interests, so that was fun. If you have all these, let's say, so I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 finished. I can just select these and you can do this individually. If you're on Photoshop, if you're on Canva, if you're on Procreate, it doesn't matter. The main thing to know is that I'm sharing and I'm sharing them as a JPEG. I'm actually going to send these to my computer just because it's easier for me to work there, but you can save it to your iPad. However you want to do that. Then I compress them if I am going to, I guess I ended up saving them to my thing. What's it called? Multitasking isn't as easy when I get older. Ear dropping to myself. You will find, I don't remember what I was saying. Let's switch over to my desktop so I can see you what's happening here. Have these over in my downloads, so I just AirDrop them to myself, but you might find them in your, what's it called? Your photos on your iPad or wherever you saved them. You'll find them where you've saved them. You can name them. I like to anything that I ever provide, that's something that someone else is going to use that I want them to remember they got it for me. Then I'll say something like IG template, gifts and then the pigeon letters. Then I'll name this one IG template choices or this or that or whatever, the pigeon letters. I want them to remember where they came from so that they remember that I am valuable. IG template favs1 the pigeon letters, because I did two, so then I can say IG template favs2 I can type the pigeon letters. Then this was the last one, IG template year in review or just say year, yeah, that seems fine. The pigeon letters. Now that I have that, you can select all of them, right-click and say compress five items. I'm using a Mac, so yours might look a little different, but basically either compress or zip is the word you're looking for. You can compress that and then it's in just one handy little file. You can say, IG templates, the pigeon letters, and then this file right here you can upload anywhere. You're going to upload it to your website as a freebie download. You can add it to a file that you send to your email list, anything like that. It's very simple to export these and the JPEGs will upload seamlessly. Next, let's go into actually uploading them and getting them to share. Because typically these types of templates aren't some that you send to people. It's usually something that you put on your own page and share, and then have people come to your page to find them. But let's say you were doing this with the highlights that we were talking about. The highlights that you find on, story highlights on someone's feed. Let's say that you created a bunch and you want to sell them on Creative Market or something, you would create a zip folder like this, so that when they unzip it, it's going to open a folder like this and then all their files are going to be there, all nice and organized. That's what you would do in that case and then you'd upload it, upload it to wherever you're going to sell it or wherever you're going to share it. However you decide to do it. I will now show you how to, just what it looks like to walk through uploading these things onto Instagram on your own.
11. Uploading Your Graphics: All right. Once you're logged in, you can save and highlight any stories that you want to. Then you can always go in and edit the cover later, so it makes it super handy. Let's say I wanted to change, let's say brushes. So this one I can say "More", I can say "Edit Highlight". All of these are going to be here and then I can edit the cover. The thing here that they didn't use to do was they'd now allow you to import an image that doesn't show up in the actual story highlight. Before you had to choose something you uploaded, so you probably saw back in the day where they had something that's, ignore these few, I'm just doing highlights or whatever. Now you can import your own photo. Let's say I wanted this banana to be my highlight cover. I made it so that this is the size of it is nice and centered. But then I see it's not actually super centered, so I can zoom in a little bit on it and have it be the center. I can make this larger if I want it to be more prominent. But let's say I love this banana. This is now my cover icon. I'm going to say "Done". This will be confusing before I finally change it, but now you can see that my highlight cover is a banana for brushes, so that's it. It's really simple and that's how you change all your highlights and you can make them nice and seamless and what you actually want them to look like. Then the other part is, let's say you're ready to share the templates that you made. Let me just go over this again in case you don't know. When you're in Instagram, if you swipe to the right, then it'll be on your story. Might just cover it up some on my iPad, but it would be your camera. Then I swipe up and then I can find those really, really hilarious looking graphics I made and then when I open them, do you see how I've done a good job staying away from the top and the bottom where those icons are going to be? So when I add this in, I can just save it as a highlight and then people know they can screenshot it and then continue. But then what happens is they'll screenshot it. It'll be in there images. They'll upload it just like we just did right now. Then they can go into text and say, oh, their favorite artist is, oh, I don't know let's just say Picasso. Okay, so their favorite artists is Picasso and then they can change the color. Maybe they'll match the color to what you did, and they'll put it here, so that's just fine. Then they'll go in and they'll fill all those in and then they can add it to their story. So it's super fun. What I would do is I'm going to show you this real quick, actually. I'm going to take this text, delete it. What I would do is I'll go ahead and just post to this. But I wanted to just show you. So once it's posted you can go back in and my Internet's a little bit slow today. Then I can go to "Highlight" on the bottom, highlight it, and then create a whole template, "Highlight", and say templates, "Add" and then I can see that on my profile I got templates down there. So now when people find, they might see this and love it, come to my page to see more templates. Then I might have this whole highlight of templates ready to go. Because I'm not ready to do that, I'm going to go ahead and remove it and then delete that story because I'll use these later, I'm sure. Yeah, that's basically the gist of it. If you are to create a bunch of highlights like this that are nice. Maybe they're doodlely or maybe you have a bunch of beautiful flowers and somebody's a blogger and they just want beautiful flowers to accompany their beautiful feed. These are hot ticket items. They're usually priced pretty low, but they sell like hot cakes. So these are things that you can think about as you explore that. The other part is with the wall papers, you can share all the wallpapers to your people on e-mail or wherever. But if you wanted to just do those free wallpapers that you see all the time where people can just screenshot them, just format it correctly. You guys know how to do that now, upload the one that you want to use. Let's say it's this guy. The icons are usually at the top. I'll just make it in the center. Then I can say, "Screenshot next slide," or no let's say, "Hold and screen shot next story for wallpaper." That usually gets people excited. You could say, "New art." Or whatever you want to say. Just put this here, upload it, and then upload it again, but just with the photo. I'll just put this up so you can see what it looks like in case you don't know that when you upload, take your time, if you hold it down, then it gets rid of the top and bottom and then you just see the artwork. So people can do that, screenshot it, and then they can add that as their phone wallpaper.
12. Now DO THIS!: All right, so we've come to the end of the class but I do want to leave you with a little tidbit or two. The first thing is I really want to reinforce the idea of sharing this with your audience. If you are a social media person, if you are trying to strive for a social media presence, and growing your account and your exposure, this is another great way to do it. A great free way to do it. Not only is it free, but you have the opportunity to actually make money from doing this depending on where it is. So think about what I said there, look into it some more, head over to these sites that I mentioned like Creative Market and Design Cuts and Etsy and C, what these packs are going for and what you can actually do with them. Additionally, if you want some more advice and straight forward methods to approaching social media, I super recommend checking out my class social media for creative entrepreneurs. It will demystify a lot for you and set you on your way for more success significantly. So I hope this was a super fun class for you. I want to see what you created. I want to see it. Please share it in the project gallery. I know other people are going to want to see it and hey, bonus, if you put your handle on it and maybe people can snag here from there and use it from there. Because then that's even better, that's even a better reach. I'll see you guys next time.
Peggy Dean, Top Teacher | The Pigeon Letters
