Instagram Branding Peekaboo: Artful Branding on Social Media with Procreate

1. Class Trailer: Hi, my name is Esther [inaudible]. I'm surface pattern designer, illustrator and lettering artist. This class is about playing peekaboo for Instagram branding. Wait, what? Well, sometime Instagram running can put you in a dilemma. On one hand, you want to claim your copyright and your authorship, but on the other hand, let's be honest. You don't want the ugly watermarks all over your feet. Well, this class is for that. I will teach you how to bulkly brand your image and strategically hide it in your personal profile feed. It's basically branding peekaboo. Well, let's dive in. 2. How it Works: When it comes to branding on social media platforms like Instagram, most people choose to put their logo somewhere on the image to claim authorship, which I think is a very intelligent thing to do. This is very helpful if your work gets picked up somewhere else and the source link is lost. Your logo helps people to trace it back to you. However, if your primary media is Instagram, this can cause a problem on your feed because you need to constantly adjust the color of your logo to contrast against different background colors. Over time, it can be a distraction on your beautifully curated feed. Well, I only mentioned this because there is a solution. In a nutshell, I will teach you how to brand your Instagram posts and make it invisible on your own feed if someone clicks on your profile. But first let me explain how it works. As of now Instagram allows variety of racial aspects that is way beyond just a square. That is where the magic happens. For example, if you have 100 pixel by 1000 pixel picture, which is four to five ratio wise, it will appear full size on your main feed, but it will be cropped off to a square once it lands on your own feed. Which means that fortunately for content creators, you can put all the rending you want on the cropped area or branding area over here and you will not show on your own feed so your visitors won't see the watermarks splattered everywhere. Say that if someone takes your image off of your Instagram and pins it somewhere else like Pinterest, that pin is going to pick up the entire image which carries your branding. Your logo is always there. It's just invisible on your own feed because of the cropping. I got a feeling that at least half of you are not interested in math for this class. I will not make you do math here. I will hand over my own template to you and show you how to use it in the next lesson so you can really streamline the whole thing. Head over to projects and resources tab for this class and download the PSD file called the branding template. I'll meet you in the next lesson. 3. How to Use the Template: In the resources area of this class, you will find a file that is called branding template. It is a PSD format file which is native to Photoshop. So once you have it open, there are three simple layers. At the very top, there is a smart object layer. It says, "Place your design here ". You want to double-click to go into this smart object. You can find your art work or your photo or whatever you want to present on your posts. For example, I'm just going to drag one of my recent work over here and drop it to the canvas. Obviously, it doesn't cover the whole area so I'm just going to hold on to Option key that will allow me to make transformation from the center. I want to make sure I cover the entire area. This image is pretty big so my Photoshop needs to think. I'm going to zoom out a little bit to make sure I get the area where I want to show over here. I'm pretty happy about this so I just hit "Enter" and it will calculate and transform the object. Once you're done here, you can delete the placeholder layer. It will just decrease the file size, but visually it doesn't really make a difference so it's really up to you. Now, you want to save this file. You don't actually need a folder destination for that. You will just save it back to the template file. You just hit Command S. You can close this tab by hitting Command W. Whatever you have done in previous file, it will be saved. The same as over here. Basically, the yellow area is replaced by your art work. The second layer says, "Branding Zone". Basically, you can purge all your branding message over here. I usually just use my logo, but if you don't have one or you want to simplify the process, feel free to just use the text tool over here and just type it out. You can claim a copyright or just simply type your name, whatever message you want to place in there, just make sure it fits in the branding zone. I'm just going to come over here to Illustrator and then select my logo and copy it. I want to go back to Photoshop and paste it as a smart object. Basically it just offers you more flexibility and you hit "Enter." You don't see it now because it's buried under the visual over here. So you want to move it to the very top and then drag it to the bottom. You might want to resize it. You don't want this to be too big that it is showing after cropping. I'm going to turn it off for a second. Remember the branding zone will disappear on your profile, but it will appear on your main feed. Whatever branding message you want to put it here, whether it's copyright claim or your own logo, you want to make sure it's confined in the branding zone. I'm going to turn it back on. See there's a pretty good margin over here. So I'm just going to turn the branding zone layer off. The background color is white, but feel free to change it to whatever else that is relevant to your brand. Then let's save it as a PNG or JPEG somewhere. Once you have the image saved, you can AirDrop it to your own phone or e-mail it to yourself or whatever to get it back to your phone. Then you can post the Instagram post from there. Once you have the file successfully transferred to your phone, you're ready to post. You can come over to Instagram and hit plus sign and find the picture. By default, it only shows the middle square. If you want to fit in a longer picture or a wider picture, you want to pinch it to make sure everything fits in. But before we do that, you can already see the branding zone is cropped off. That's a good sign. That shows us this will be the preview image when someone click on your personal profile. Pinch it to make sure everything fits in here. You hit next and do whatever necessary adjustment you want to have. Then you can just post it here and add caption. Once you hit share, it will post it to your main feed. As you scroll down, you will see that the branding is visible over here. The height is taller than its width. If you click on your profile, the branding actually doesn't show at all. But if you click on individual post, you'll still be able to see. Say that if someone lifted up and pinned it on Pinterest, they will be able to see this entire image. But your Instagram will remain pretty clean without all the branding noises. There you go. This is just one example that I gave you that is a four to five ratio. If your posts are normally landscape, you can still use the same template. Just rotate the canvas and save it that way. This also works on video as well. As long as you just leave the center square alone and put your branding on the side, and you're all good to go. I hope this little short class is helpful and it gives you more confidence or peace of mind posting on social media knowing that you have your claim of authorship somewhere on the image and your feed will still be beautifully curated without the branding noises. Good luck and have fun.