Instagram Carousels: Grow Your Following With Magnetic Content

1. Introduction: Hey, my name is Jeremy. I am a brand designer from Sydney Australia and in this class I am going to be showing you how to structure and layer your carousels. I'm going to show you how to design it from scratch by using imagery, topography, colors, and mixing it all up with shape and form and all these Instagram cubes as well. I'm going to show you how to get some ideas and inspiration from certain accounts. I am also going to show you how to design everything in Illustrator as always using Photoshop to cut out images, so you can overlay them and overlap seven slides to make it look more appealing. I am also going to show you how to do a bit of animation, how to critique and actually refine your carousels and how to make it better and look more appealing based on your brand. For your class project, what we are going to be doing, or you have to do is create only one carousel, and it's going to be based on something you learned in the last six months. It could be maybe about a logo design you learned or a process, or maybe you learned how to read a book, or maybe you learned an ID from someone or one of your friends or something like that. Let us look at the class is going to be super fun, super awesome, and it's going to help you engage with your audience and help you grow an amazing following. For me personally, I've done Instagram carousels and I've grown over 4K followers in under six months, which is super crazy. I'm sure you can do the same as well. So let's jump in the class and role today, and I'm keen to see how you guys design you first carousels. 2. Instagram Inspiration: I'm going to show you a few accounts that inspire me, and I've also witnessed Dain and Julian actually go from only 1,000 subscribers to go to 20,000, 25,000 now, which is crazy, so carousels do work, and I'm just going to show you a few people that you should follow just to get some inspiration, not to copy them, but to see how they structure their carousels as well as get some inspiration on something I did. I just wanted show you a few accounts that I follow myself, that you should definitely jump on, so the first one is Dain Walker, he's really great, he started off with 100 subscribers, and now he actually creates carousels for clients and stuff like that, which is super awesome, so you can see all his work, really good carousels, clear branding, color palette and typography, really nice work, so definitely check him out. Another one is Julian, also known as Juju Branding, he's an awesome one as well, he has a similar type of vibe. You can see different branding, he's got his own style. Everyone is unique in their own little way, which is really good, you don't want to just be a copycat, you actually want to be different and stand out. Another big one is Morejanda, 100,000 followers, he's really great as well, he's also an author, and he's such an amazing guy in the design community, especially on Instagram. You can check his pages as well, he's got very educational posts, mainly geared towards younger designers. It doesn't matter if you're a designer, you can still learn things about design, and creativity, and even that work and stuff, so definitely go follow him, you can see he's using the yellow palette as well, yellow is always a nice color, it's in-between of everything, I feel. Then you've got Chris Do, you might know him or you might not, he's got 242,000 followers, he was growing, I think 10,000 followers a week, or a day, or something crazy like that. It was super fast, and you can see if I go over some of his carousels you can see 9,000 likes, 10,000 likes, but a lot of engagement in the comments as well like 500 comments, that's really good. You can see his one's are more creative, they're mainly aimed at designers as well, because he's a teacher, but you can see, really cool, really interesting, he mixes up the creativity and the layouts and stuff, which I like. Then another guy as well, really lovely guy in the community, his name is Dan Romero. The one thing about him, he's a smaller one, but the thing is he only has a certain amount of post, he has less than 20 posts, but he was able to generate over 10,000 followers within a couple of months, so it was really fast, but you can see he has a consistent look and feel, his niche is just focused on UI design, that's all he focuses on, he's really good at that and that's all he projects. There's also a video you can watch which I find very useful if you want to grow your audience on Instagram, is the Foundr Magazine, they're pretty much entrepreneurial, and they do a lot of videos on Instagram, so they have a video called "Top Five Ways to Grow Your Instagram for Free", it's six months old, but it's still useful, and they've got a whole bunch in their playlist, so definitely go check them out, because they talk about Instagram and how to grow it, and their Instagram account has two million followers, I think now which is crazy good. So definitely even though these people might seem like they have a lot, they started from nothing as well, so you can achieve the same thing, just use them as inspiration, and there's plenty more other accounts out there, friends that I have on Instagram, that I follow as well, that you can really learn something. Hopefully this will show you the potential that you can have on creating awesome Instagram carousels. 3. Instagram Growth Pro Tips: I'm going to share with you some Instagram growth tips that I personally use and that have worked and also know some other people use it as well. I'm going to jump right into it. The first thing is engagement. You need to be engaging with the community, with the audiences around you. You need to engage with people because it's a social platform. You need to be communicating with people; they just expect people to just come to the site, follow or ask for a follow, that's just pointless. You need to be engaging and some of the ways here is some good ways to engage and build rapport with people. Number 1, being you can send audio exams to new followers. That really builds, that kicks off the relationship, builds rapport with them and it's also like a friendly way of saying hi. It also builds your confidence as well. Another thing is comment on other people's posts. Don't just leave like an emoji here and there. Try and put a sentimental to try and maybe give feedback. Try and do something constructive to say. Number 3, would share others posts in your stories. If you see available carousel or you see a cool post or quote or something, share it in your Instagram stories because what happens is people will share on their Instagram story, and they have a bigger following. People will see your account and they can actually, some people click on your account and follow you if you have interesting content. Another few thoughts is comment a thoughtful sentence, whichever he said, and comment on big accounts as well. If you follow big accounts, for example, like Christo and Michael Janda, and as soon as they do a post, what you need to do is go onto the comment section and leave a comment straight away. Because there's such big accounts, what tends to happen is that a lot of people are waiting for them to post and they have a lot of notifications coming at one time. So what happens is when you comment, a lot of people are scrolling through reading the comments because it's going to be valuable and it will help you get more seen and more noticed as well. The second key thing I believe is relationship. One of the ways you can build relationships actually collaborate with others often, whether it be like a call or a post or even a podcast, we did like five logo designers and we designed one brief. That was an example of that. I've also talked to people to jump on their podcast as well, which is really cool. Another thing is, you got to build friendships. If you're using Instagram as a place to be social, interact, build friendships and really see how you can add value and help others, not just be selfish because that doesn't work. You got to support others. So like, share, and comment on their content. Obviously, this all takes time. You got to spend time. At least an hour or two hours a day on your account doing these things to make sure that you're going to be growing and you're getting noticed and you're building those friendships. Number 4, is join DM groups. For me, I have a few engagement groups where we share each other's work, we comment on each other's posts as soon as we post, and we also feedback and stuff like that and I feel like those are very valuable. Obviously, you don't want to be in groups where it's just like spam, try and join ones, try and keep quality over quantity. I feel like that's better. Then once again, get involved in the community. So joining on webinars or the big accounts, communicate with them, talk to them, DM them, and just get involved in designing generally just be everywhere. I'm going to tell you some don'ts. These things that I've seen people do and it just doesn't work. Don't buy followers or bots. Don't spam others in the DMs or even on their posts. Don't be needy or selfish. Don't just copy and steal other people's carousels or posts. I've seen that; it just doesn't work. Secondly, Instagram scans the pictures and the post to see if it's being copied or if it's somewhere else already in the algorithm. Also don't sell without giving value first. It's always key that just spamming and selling and asking. Be giving; what do you have to offer? What knowledge do you have? Even if you're just a beginner, you have something to learn or just ask, it's okay to ask for advice and things. Just don't spam people and try and like be sharing their content and stuff. If you really look up to someone, help them by liking, commenting, and sharing, and they'll reciprocate that if you do that every time. 4. Growth Tools for Instagram: I'm going to show you my top tools that I actually used for Instagram. I'm going to show you the ones that I actually use, and then some have used in the past. A few of them are actually free to use and they have some trials and then some are actually paid as well. But I'm going to show you what I use. The first one is called Dollar Eighty. They base the whole idea of Gary Vees Dollar Eight strategy where you put your two cents on the top, nine posts on Instagram and then on nine top different hashtags and you put a comment and it's like a way of organically growing. You can see here is the homepage and you can see they've got a free version which is cool and you can get a monthly subscription. I'm currently on the monthly subscription, which is really cool. But you can test it out and try it out. I'm going to show you the back end real quick. You can see here they have a progress bar, which is nice. The goal is to do 90 a day. It's a bit of work it will take you probably like maybe half an hour to go through and comment on these different posts. Pretty much I have the top 10 hashtags that I'm using. You can see logoinsoirations, instagramalgorithm, logodesign. I'm targeting top hashtags, but you don't want to aim on big hashtags. You want to also aim for low ones as well because that helps you attract and it'll help you get to the top of the posts in different low categories. Pretty much what you do, I can filter by erasing our top posts. Typically if the top posts is I'm not erasing. You can see I can put my mouse over it and it shows me two hours, how many likes, how many comments, which is cool. Maybe I want to comment on this, I click on it. Then I'll look at the content. It's about typography, I really like the layout on the design of this, is really cool. I'll leave my two cents of nice layout, really cool carousel, good job, something like that. Then what tends to happen once you click post it pretty much queues up that comments. You can see here, it's limits it. You don't get shadow bands. I'll go through and comment on different pieces. I might change it to recent and I can see and I'll just comment on all these different content. It helps you get sane, and it helps you engage and meet new people as well. If I click on locations as well, I can filter through locations, maybe you're targeting businesses and things you can see I can aim certain hashtags. If I click on my targets, I can actually change the hashtags as well. You can see, I can rename it if I want. Type branding or branding agency and then I can click save and that will change it. I can also do locations as well. I typically focus on this side, not actual locations unless you're a local business and you want to target that. I can click on my history as well and see what I've commented on. That's pretty cool. I can also click on my activity as well. It will give me an overview of my progress as well. You can see my progress for today, my followers, my following, my engagement. They give you some analytics, and my activity. You can see all that, which is really cool. They're obviously updating it and releasing new features. I find that it's an organic way of growing your channel. That's one tool I've been using and it's been working, I've been getting more followers. Second one is IQ hashtags. You can see I'm in the back end, this one. They have a free version, but it's only really worth if you get the paid version. If I go here to the main page you can see they've got like a standard $11 a month. But I have other friends that are using this and it seems to be working for them. But if I just go back, it's pretty cool. You can do like a hashtag search. I can do IG profile analysis. Gives you sort of analysis of your growth. I can search top 9 and also hashtags, performances as well. I don't use this tool, but it's just I wanted to share it with you because you guys might find it interesting. The third one is Planoly. I know a few people using this to schedule out close to plan. You can also analyze an older post and comment and all that stuff. Another one I've used is later.com. I previously used to use this, but now I just use Facebook because Facebook doesn't like third party platforms, especially Instagram as well, sometimes it can prevent, like reduce your engagement in growth and stuff like that. Well, some things might not work. Just keep in mind when you do third party programs, they want you to stay on their own platforms. If I go to the Back-end, you can see it's got a calendar, it's got a media library. We can upload images. Let's go conversations, which is an upgrade. You have to upgrade to the full plan. Then you can like look at overview of your audience, your performance, hashtags and analytics and all that stuff. You can do all that cool stuff. I don't use this in mobile, just thought this was useful. Displaypurposes.com is another cool tool as well. It's mainly for hashtags. I can type in some keywords in here. I'm going to type here some hashtags, and then it'll automatically generate some relevant hashtags. Any hashtag that has been banned, it will not show up. But you can see all these hashtags and what I can do is you can limit it as well. I can limit the hashtags to how many I want. I can leave on order and if I click, "Copy," it will pop up like this and I just press control C. When I'm creating my content, I can come into creative a studio and press paste and paste in my hashtags here. This is a cool tool. If you feel like you're stuck, let me just refresh. If you feel like you're stuck. You can use this tool to get hashtags. Finally, I use Creator studio. Now, as you'll see in other parts of this course, to do all my content because it's owned by Facebook and Instagram likes using its own platform. Creditor studio is the way to go and then I can create my content through here and adding that through this. I feel like these tools are really beneficial and great. Do what works for you. But currently I'm using Creator studio and Dollar Eighty at the moment and that's working for me and also display purposes here and there. Yeah. 5. Flick Hashtag Tool + IG Blade: So a recent tool I've been using for Instagram is actually called Flick. I think it's one of the best hashtag tools at the moment. The UI is just great, the design is great. It's very functional, very easy to use and overall, they provide resources as well, which I feel is really handy. This is just their website. You can check it out flick.tech with a H at the end. You can start a free trial for seven days. I'm just going to inside. Once you login and have an account, you can see on the left-hand side, your toolbar. So if you click on the first one, you'll get this page. It will say search a hashtag or topic. For example, I've been working on YouTube carousel, so I'm just going to type in YouTube. Press "Enter." It will take you to this other page, so when it adds your hashtag, it adds into a tab. Then what it does, it actually gives you the best hashtags that have low competition, medium competition, and high competition. If I click the top right, you can see I've got these different views. It's in grouped view, but I can click on table view to change that. It's also going to give me my average likes, the posts made and the comments there and DAPC is daily average post count. You can see how many people are posting to this every day. You can see the competition score and the potential reach on this little bars here. You can also click on these three dots if you want to add to a collection or previewing Instagram. If I click "Preview in Instagram," it'll take me to Instagram where it will show me the posts of that hashtag so I can see the quality and whatever content is on there. Also a graph view as well before I go back. You can see it pretty much provides all the speech bubbles and shows the connections and how everything's connected. If I click on it, it'll show me the posts made, the likes, just like before, but I can move these things around and play with it. But obviously I just keep it simple and use grouped view. On the top right corner you'll see these blue bar. I want to click that. Then what I can actually do, you can see it starts to add all these hashtags that I select. I'm going to select some of these hashtags and when you click it, you can see it starts adding it to the right side bar. I'm going to click on them. With high competition, I usually do around five, then medium, you want to aim for like 10 or 15, and then low competition you want to have more. Because it depends on your growth of your channel, how many you have, between one and 5k you want to have more low competition and beyond 10k you want to have more medium. Then as you get higher and higher, you want to have more high ones. I'm just going do a quick example. You can see I've done 15 hashtags and I can click "Add to Collection." I can also copy them and paste them inside my creative studio as well, which is cool. If I'm happy with all these selections, I can also add another hashtag as well before I do that, so I can type in content creator. It will add another tab. In my left side, you can see I've got two tabs, and then I can add some more of these tags. Click these. Maybe I want 30 hashtags. I can delete them by clicking the X's, and then I can add it to a collection. So if I click that, you can see I already have one collection here called YouTube, but I can add a new collection and call this YouTube 2 and click "Create." Now I have this new collection. Once I'm done here, I can actually go to my hashtag collection, which is on the left here you see the little folder with the star, I can click that. Now I have this collection. So you can save certain collection, so you can mix up your hashtags. One thing is you don't want to constantly post the same hashtag every time you post a carousel or post over post. You want to make sure you're mixing it up. You can see here this is my first collection and then my second collection here. Then obviously you can edit your collections and turn some off. So if I only want to copy some of them, I can untick and then click "Copy collection." It's on a copy. Then if I just go, for example, you see I can paste it in, which is really easy to do. You also got some other actions here. If I click on the drop-down menu on the top right, I can select some actions, I can paste, I can import, I can change the collection name, I can delete the collection, and I can also add it to favorites as well and you'll see you add it to the top there. That's a really handy tool. So you can have multiple collections. If you have one for marketing, one for branding, one for YouTube, like you can have multiple ones, which is really cool. Another thing is they have analytics. If I click on "Analytics," which is the fourth icon down, I can see my followers, I can see the stats for the people reached, I can also see my profile visits here as well, and then some other stats here. You can see my engagement rates, my saves, and all this other stuff. If I scroll down here, it also gives me more audience activity. So it's pretty much the same analytics you'll get in the Instagram app, you'll get it here in a different UI design, so it looks a lot nicer here. I can change the style of the chart. I can see my website clicks, impressions, 150k really good, 90,000 people reach, really, really good. That's really useful. If I click on the top layers or the tabs, I can see other stuff here. I can see content. I can see what's the best performing content, that's really good. Then I can get hashtags, I can click insights. I ranked 61 out of 67 for unique hashtags. So you can see this, so I can see what's performing. I can go to audience. We can see the best time to post. You can see the darker the blue, the better the post. Top countries are India and then US, Indonesia, Australia. That's really cool. Top cities, top languages. I go down, age and gender. So I have more males than females. Then I can click "Reports," and I can put in this information and I can get a report of everything for that week, which I feel like is really, really cool. That's the basics of using that. There's another option here if you want to add on viral post finite, that's a purchasable add-on. I don't think you need that. You can click on "Resources" here as well. They actually have a lots of useful guides, so you can see guides here and it's all free. It's all part of the package as it comes with how to use flake Instagram hashtags. You can see they are all like blog posts that I can click on and read. It's really useful for beginners and would really help you stand out. Then down here, it's got a Flick Wiki as well, which will take you to the notion app, that you can see the improvements in other things they're working on. That's pretty much it. Then you've got your account bubble here. If I click on the bottom that you can see I've got account settings, manage IG accounts, if you want to add another account. You can see I've got my one account here, but you can obviously add a different one or refresh and link it. I can see Account Settings, stuff like that, and also billing and referrals so that you have an affiliate program as well, which is really cool. That's pretty much flick in a nutshell, hope you guys found that useful. Another cool tool that I've been using as well is actually called igblade.com. Very similar to Social Blade, but I feel like this UI is a lot easier, a lot smoother. At the moment, you can see it gives you all my bio heap, my followers who I'm following, my posts. If I scroll down it gives me an overview. I can change the overview to the last seven days, I can do the last 90 days, and it will certainly show me all the statistics and the numbers. Obviously don't obsess over the numbers, but it's good to pay attention to what's happening. I can see my followers, my daily growth rate, monthly growth rate, which is pretty cool, and I can see all the followers here as well. So you can see the growth there, been growing pretty crazy, which is awesome. I'm super thankful. Then I'll scroll down. I can see my engagement rate is six percent, which is A plus for Pool mass or show me the grade which is really cool. Average likes, that's awesome. Then some posting habits here and engagement. You can see some of the timings there, which is also in there. You have an upgradeable one as well, which you can upgrade if you'd like. I can search stats and I can click on posts as well to see my posts and see the hashtags I used. Overall it's a really simple and easy to use tool, that's igblade.com and you just type in your name and you can sign in, it's free. You can search other people's accounts actually as well. If I search my wife out, then you I can see her stats. Sometimes it doesn't show up properly, but overall, it's a really cool tool to use. 6. Bio Link Tools: I want to show you a few plug-ins that I use for my Instagram that I've used in the past and one that I'm currently using now. The first one is called Linktree. What this allows you to do is pretty much create a link where you can paste into your Instagram profile. You can also paste it on LinkedIn, anywhere pretty much on Twitter, on Facebook, wherever it is and you can store a whole bunch of links so people can find what they're looking for. Whether you offer freebies or courses or templates, maybe you do consulting course or you have a portfolio, you can use this link to pretty much attract people and when they click on it, it's going to open and show up. This is Linktree. You can see the pricing here is pretty cheap. You can see for the pro version it's $6, but you can also test it for free, but you are limited to only links. You can't really customize anything, but you can see this is what it provides for $6 US a month. It's pretty cheap. Overall you got analytics, customization, all these co-integrations you can add into that. You can log into here, you can log in with Instagram. It's fairly straightforward. If I authorize it, it's going to connect to my Instagram and you can go play around with that. The one that I'm using at the moment is called Taplink. If you've got a Taplink, you can see here it's pretty much focused on Instagram as well. What they do, it feels a bit more corporate, but you can customize. It's actually really professional and the design is really nice and the layout is simple. You can see here it's very targeted. But I'm just going to go to the pricing page real quick so you see the pricing here. The pricing is cheaper than Linktree, so it is a big competitor. You can see you can pay for three months, it's only $4 a month for pro and if you go up to 12 months it's only $2 a month so you only pay 25 bucks for a whole year. You can use the basic versions but with the basic you can't customize the colors and some other stuff which can be annoying so I've opted in for the pro version. I'm going to quickly sign in here. I'm going to sign in with my Instagram. Now once I'm in the back end of Taplink, you can see I've got my link at the top here. I can click "Publish" when I've done my design, I can copy the link. You can see if I go to my Instagram, you can see this is the link here. On my back end, I'm just going to close Linktree, you can see this is my design that I've set up. If I go to my page and click this, it's going to take people to this page and it's all responsive for mobile. They can look at my courses, my products, my coaching, my resources as well and my other platforms here. If they click on that, it's going to take them to that link and you can see it even works on desktop as well. It's really simple, super easy to use, and it's actually really cool. If I go back here, you can also check the statistics so I can see what people are clicking on. At the moment people are clicking on the Instagram carousel course, so that has an 85 percent conversion, which is pretty cool. I can see the average page view, so it's around 30ish to 20. I can see what's working, and what's not. I can view it by week as well. I can also click on "Leads", but this is a business plan add-on, so you need to upgrade for that. I can add on Mailchimp, Google Analytics and other platforms, whatever they have here is really cool. I can also go into the settings here and play around with different themes. When I click on "Settings," I can change the overall design. I can change my text color, which you see so I can make it red. I can change the font style. If I want to go to a different font, I can change that, whatever I'm feeling, just to keep it simple and overall clean. The text color's here so if I want to use your brand color, you can click on this eye dropper and type in the hex code here to whatever brand color it is and it will change on the link. You can see my links are changing on the left. It's really great to keep it on brand. If I just go back, paste my link in there and then I'll have my orange color there. You can also change if you want to rounded or not, like that. That's really cool too. You can change link style in the background as well, you can upload an image. Really, really handy. I can also go to standard themes and if I click on one of these, it would change the theme for me. They also have Valentine's Day gradients as well. If I want a gradient theme, if I click that, it's actually going to change it like this. Whatever one I pick, that's really cool as well. They've got patterns. You can see it's got some love hearts which is cool. They also got New Year's and also Halloween as well. They got really cool. Then you can choose a theme or edit a theme and customize it to your liking, which is really cool. I can click on "General," so you can add a custom domain if you have the business plan. You can also add page settings as well and also SEO titles there, which is really handy. If I click back onto my page, I can view it. I can also drag and move things around. You can drag things around like this, which is really sweet. I can click on the blocks. If I click on my coaching block, you can see I can change the text, I can put a subtitle, I can add my website link, I can click "Settings" and change the colors here and pretty much change these settings here. I can see the stats and the add-ons. If I can click on "Action," I can actually archive this or duplicate it or delete it if I don't want it. It's really easy to use. If I want to add a block, I can click "Add a block," and then I can add all these blocks. I can add a carousel, social links, just a simple link, an avatar, a video, there's so much things you can do with this. It's really useful and if you're not having a targeted link in your bio, then I recommend using either Linktree or Taplink and it's going to ultimately change the game for your profile. 7. Instagram Analytics + Best Time to post: To go see the insights, go to the top right menu with the three lines, that's the hamburger menu, click that and click insights. Once you do that, then you can have access to all the data of every post and every part of your audience and activity on your Instagram account. So if you click on content, and then you go to posts, you can see now I'm scrolling down and seeing all my posts. You can actually filter out by the year and what type of filter. Right now it's on reach, so you can see the amount of reach I have. Then if I go ahead and select the post, it says view insights, I can click that button on the left there you can see in the blue writing, click that and I can view individual insights for every post. I can see the likes, the comments, the shares, and the saves. I can see the profile visits, also the amount of reach as well. Then if you scroll down, you can actually see other data, like the discovery, the amount of followers I got from the post, the amount of reach, the impressions via the homepage, hashtags, the explore page, which you can all see their numbers there. You can spend some time looking and analyzing your content, what is working well, what's not working and really seeing where other people and the followers are coming from. So you can see here, I've got about 300 from the explore page, 2000 from hashtags and majority came from other places. So it could be from shares or other people seeing my post, from someone else's page or story or something. That's really cool to keep in mind. That's the insights for that specific post. I can go ahead and I can change the type of filter. Maybe I want to see likes or maybe I want to see the amount of shares or what has the most shares. So if I click Shares, you can see my top three posts at the top. It has 455 shares on this one. So that's pretty interesting. I'm going to click that and you can see all the statistics there. I'm going to analyze. So people really liked this content, it got shared a lot, it got saved a lot. So this person's did very well. You can search by different parameters and really see all the different types of data that you need, so you can actually improve your Instagram carousels and improve your actual content as a whole. You can also change the time periods. Maybe I want to see the last 30 days, I can see all that data there. Instead of seeing overall one year, I can also go back and start to look through other things. What post got the most comments? How can I increase my engagement? I can see my top posts there, those are the ones with the most engagements, the ones that cause the most talking. So that's another interesting thing as well. That's the first part, that's content. So you also got activity. So activity pretty much shows the interactions on your page or your profile. It shows me the reach, the impressions, also, the interactions, which is how people are interacting, taking action on my account, just in general. Also the profile visits as well.So people actually seeing my content on our page and clicking and seeing my profile, that's what the profile visit is.Then also my website clicks. When you put a website in your bio, someone clicks on that, that's what the website clicks on. So that's activity. Activity is really cool. Another thing is audience, that's the third tab in the inside. So I can see my overall growth, how many followers I'm getting over each day. You can see where it says SMTW, that's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, all the days there. I can see my top location. So you can see Mumbai and Delhi. So India, majority of people are looking at my content, the age range as well. You can see, it's like 25 years old, which is super cool. Also the gender, women and men percentage, the bottom, you've got the followers. If I flip through each day, I can see when people are most on. So you can see the time, this is 3:00 PM, 06:00 PM. I can see, if I click on the bars, it will show me the amount of people on at that time, so then I know when's the best time to post to get the most engagement. I can flick through the days by clicking the arrows and you can see the times changed a little bit. So I want to be posting on those times, where it's the most active. 8. Using Engagement Groups: I want to talk a little bit about engagement groups. Why engagement groups? Engagement groups can help you boost and jumpstart your account and getting more followers when you're early starting off. As you grow into the 5,000 and 10,000 range, you stop needing engagement groups as much because if you're posting good content organically, you going to grow anyway. But a few reasons why you can use engagement groups if you're struggling, it helps boost your posts when you post. It's going to help the algorithm because people will comment straight away as you post. Because you share in the group and whoever is online they can share it, or they can comment on it, so it's going to help you boost that post up straightaway. It's also can help you build friendships with like-minded people. When other people want to grow as well, then you're going to help and support each other, so it's a good way to build community. It's going to increase your comments on your posts because when you share your posts in the actual group chat, then people can actually comment back, they can like and stuff like that, so it's going to help you get more of the engagement. It also helps you get more attention because as your engagement group grows, as people invite people, or as you invite more people, maybe they didn't know you, so you're getting introduced to new people every time so this going to help you get more attention and get more followers. How did you join and what are the do's and don'ts of engagement groups. You can obviously create your own engagement group on Instagram. All you have to do is click on the messaging button on your Instagram profile and go to the messaging side of things and what you can do is just click in the corner and then you can add people to your chat. You can search for people, or click on the little button there next to their name, and it's going to add them to a group chat and you can get your own group. For me earlier on. I didn't create my own groups, I actually got invited to a few groups. People liked my content and they wanted me to be in the group, so I just automatically joined. But I don't obviously use it as much anymore. But another way is to be active in them and help each other out, so don't just post stuff in there. Actually go on other people's posts and comment on their posts and help them out as well. Because if you don't follow people back and help them, then they're not going to do the same for you. You want to make it a win-win situation. You want to both be giving back to each other, to multiple people in the group. Obviously do what you can. You don't have time to do everyone just do whoever is the most recent posts you can do. Also comment thoughtfully on each other's posts. Don't just say nice, or give it an emoji. Try and add a few lines or something on your friend's pose or give feedback or something like that. Once again, just a reminder. Avoid being selfish. Make sure, you follow others and engage with other people's posts that they post in the actual group. You can grow together because some people, if they feel like people are not helping, then they might leave the group and then your group would fade away pretty much. Those are a few tips on how to join, do's and don'ts and why engaging groups are good, especially if you're beginning or just starting out. 9. How I Get Ideas: One of the things that people who struggle with these, actually coming up with ideas. What I believe is that over time of your live, on your journey, you actually grow knowledge, you develop your relationships, and you pull inspiration from the world around you. I don't necessarily go on research certain things to come up with ideas. I just have a lot of ideas already inside of me, and I get a lot of inspiration from movies. I listen to a lot of different types of music, I'm also a bit of a gamer, so I actually play games online. I watch a lot of YouTube videos and stuff. Also, not just about design, or music, or games, I actually watch videos on different stuff like technology, on PC stuff, because I on a PC, about science. I watch some documentaries sometimes. I also read books, and all kinds of books on business, spirituality, psychology, or different types of stuff. I'm constantly filling my mind with ideas all the time, and information and knowledge, and what that helps me do is actually be able to craft ideas that I already have inside of me, and that's what you have to do. It's a journey, and you don't just go and copy people. You can do research online and try and get ideas, but you want to use things from your personal perspective and your experience. That's the best way to create content, is based on your belief systems and things like that. What I usually do, I'm on notion at the moment, this is where I use everything. I used to use Google Docs, if you use Google Docs as telephone, maybe use Microsoft Word, that's cool as well. Some people use Trello, that's awesome as all. I just use Notion it's very easy because it has all my pages and everything in one place, so I don't have to jump all around in different apps. What I've got here, you can see here on the right, I have Instagram tags in different categories. You can see logo design, brand design, and stuff. What I do is, I do a bit of research online. Sometimes I copy them from big accounts, and then I reward some of them, what's relevant to the actual post. But you can literally just copy some tags that do well. But you don't want to just get tags that are based on, like the big accounts, you want to try and do tags that are growing like maybe 50,000 or 100,000, then you'll do a tag maybe that has like 500,000 followers or whatever, and then you go into a million. You got to break it down. But that's just my tags there, so I can just copy and paste it, ready to go. Then whatever written down here is, some of the strengths that I'm good at, what you can do is actually write down 10 strengths or 10 things that are relative to you, or 10 skill sets or things that you can talk about because that will help you craft some content around those themes. For example, maybe or a UI designer and maybe you've had a freelance experience and working with some clients that needed UI design, maybe you can talk about this experience with that type of client. Or maybe you're a photographer, and you like taking landscape pictures and you've learned a few tips and tricks on how to edit it in Photoshop or something, so that will be an educational tutorial. Write out these things that are relevant to you. Write out 10 or how many you can of themes, and then break it down and see on how many topics you can teach, because content is pretty much teaching anyway. But I just want to highlight here as well, is the main sources or the main core pillars of your content is either they're educational, inspirational, or informational. You've got to be doing either one of those things. For example, if you go to my profile, you can see that some of my posts are more motivational and inspirational and it's more about like mindset, and then other posts, I'm more education, where I'm talking about fonts, and file types, and colors, and that's more like educational and designs related stuff. So you can see the difference there, the very different types of posts, but at the core, the design is all the same. How I get ideas? As I said before, using all my inspiration, what I do as I have a body in Notion, so you can see what we're going to be working on is the journey. If I click in here, I've just written out everything here. First off, I put some themes down. So we're going to be designing the journey in this course, and the journey to me, it's more about like a personal journey, and it's like success, it's not a night thing, a journey is about the process. It's about growth, it's about self-development, and even as a designer, you don't just become an amazing designer overnight, you got to learn the technical skills, then you learn how to work with clients and all those things, so it's a whole pathway. Based on some of my thoughts I already had, I write down some themes. What are some themes that I could relate with the journey? With the ideas, you can just relate it with your personal life and use imagery from around you in your own environment, or you need a storytelling, you can relate it to a character or something. For instance, I was thinking about maybe an astronaut traveling to the moon, that's a journey, explorer going through the jungle, searching for treasure, that's the top of journey. I could do a personal progress shots showing my initial stages from my early days as a designer and show the work, I could do it like that. I put mountain climbing, hiking in the woods, climbing a rock or something, climbing a mountain. I put like a desert traveler, traveling through desert to get to an oasis or like a city. So I'm connecting all these dots. You can relate things with real-world situations or real-world themes. If you watch a lot of movies, it'd be easy for you to figure it out. But you want to try and keep it fun, keep it engaging. You don't want to keep it too blend because the more you're storytelling, and you have a theme behind it, it'll be a lot more interesting and engaging. Then from that what I do, I start to write out some lines, very basic lines. You can see here, I've just written out all this stuff talking about the process or the journey. Then what I do, I start to write down my tags at the bottom here, and then from this, I can go into creator studio, which I'll show you how to do later on, and I'll copy and paste everything, and then I'll schedule the post, so it's all done and all ready. That's how I generate some ideas. What we're going to do now is start to create the actual carousel. 10. Setup File in Illustrator: First, what you're going to do is Open illustrator, click on File, and click on New. The showcase Control N, O command in. If you're on a Mac. You will get this box that pops up and what we're going to do is want to rename this file. I'll call it Instagram Course Example. Whatever name you call your carousel. The width and height should be 1080 by 1080, that's the square format of Instagram. I'm going to leave them on points. You can change it to pixels if you'd like. It's pretty much the same thing anyway. You also want to change Artboards to ten. This will save us time later on. It's just really easier to just do it now. Leave the blade on 0. Color Mode should be an RGB and the ppi doesn't have to be on high, can be on screen, or medium is fine because obviously, you're not printing it. That's why it's going to be an RGB because people were going to be on their phones and on screens and ppi, most screens don't show 300 anyway. That's totally cool. Once you're happy that what we're going to do is just press "Create" cool. You can see I have all the [inaudible] here. What I want to do now is I want to have them in a straight line. I don't want them in like a box format like this. What you want to do, you want to get your Artboard section. You can click on window and go down to the Artboard menu. As you can see, my mouse is over that. You can click on that. I'm going to just hold space for so I can move around the Artboard and left-click and what I want to do is just move across a bit to so i can see what's happening. I'll click on my Artboard panel here. I'll click the drop-down menu with the hamburger menu. You see the three lines. Click that. Then we want to click on rearrange all Artboards. Once you click that, you get another box pop up and this gives us some options on editing the format and layout of the Artboards. What I'm going to do is just select the columns. The column says ten.That's what we want. We don't want it on four or two or three, we want to actually on 10 and we want the spacing to be zero and you can leave this ticked that we'll just move outlook. We didn't have any design on there, so it's fine. But if you do have a design or a shape or whatever, a column, then it will move it with the Artboard. Once you're happy with that, you can press "Okay". Now you can see all the Artboards are right in the line next to each other with zero spacing. Say, if I zoom in really closely, you can see it's all connected. If I come and put an element or shape and I save it, it's going to show that it's flowing across the two carousel and I can just go all the way across, and there you have it. From here you can start to crate and design. This is how you set up the document in Illustrator. I'll also show you how to set up the document in Photoshop as well. Once a document is set up, I'm going to set up a few things before I start looking for images that I want. I'm just going to clean up my swatches here. I'll go my swatch panel here. Click on the little drop down menu. Click "Select All Unused " which will select all these color that I don't want It just makes the file bit bigger and it just makes everything messy. From that I clicked a little bin icon here and the right side and click "Delete" and my swipe. Now what I'm going to do, I'm going to do the same thing. Click the drop-down menu, go Open Swatch Library and then I already have my swatches safety. If you have a swatch panel or a file, you can load those in as well. What I'm going to do is just click the photos just to let brown colors so you can see you've got the charcoal blacks and grays, and I also got my orange color, which is my main color. Once I have that, I can start to use that in my file. Before I go look for images, am just going in to to lay down a box. But I like to play with my layers. What I do with my layers is to make everything more efficient, I tend to do a background layer. I'll type in the layer by double-clicking on it and click bg and that means stands for background and what I'm going to do is press "M" for the marking tool or the rectangle tool and then I'm started drag a box of all the Artboards and I'll make it black because I like going for the black palate. You can see that I've got for my dark charcoal color there and then what I can do is, I can actually lock this layout with the little lock key. I don't have to worry about it. I'm going to make a new layer by clicking the little paper folder paper there and then I can call this design. I can also make another layer for the first slide or the last slide as well because typically that's always the same. But for now, Let's have two layers and then I can just go back and drop the layers over there. Now, I've got my background there, I've got my uploads ready and now I'm ready to start to find some images and actually get my message across. 11. Setup + Export in Photoshop: I want to quickly show you how to setup your Instagram carousel file in Photoshop. I'm going to click on File on the top left corner and click on new, and what we want to do, is you just want to copy these settings. We want to make a height of 1080 and the width of 10,000 by 800. So it's pretty much just timesing the height by 10 and I will show you a cool trick as well in Photoshop. If you press the asterix case, I hold Shift and press the number eight in your keyboard, you'll get an asterix. Then if you do 10, it means it's going to do 1080 times 10. So if I just click up, you can see it times it and now we have that number. So that's just a cool little tip that I have for you. So the width should be this size and the height that size, make the orientation this and you didn't have to tick on apples, that's fine. Resolution is fine and everything else should be kept the same. You can call it Instagram carousel or just call it test, I'm going to click Create. The first thing we want to do, is we want to set our slides. So we're going to do that by using a guide layout. I'm going to go on the top left corner, click on View and click new guide layout. We want to make sure the columns is set to 10 and make sure you take this box and you can see the guides get created on the board. So I press Okay and that should be sweep. So then we got all our slides now, so what I can do is start to create and add images. So what I can do, is I can add a solid color layout maybe black, I can start throwing some images. Maybe I'll chuck in some bananas, and if I want the overlapping effects, I want to put place the image where the guide is, so you can see where this guide is, that's in-between slide one and slide two. So you just chuck the image in the middle there and when you slide across the carousel, you should see it flow across. I might chuck in some more images here. Now you can always play around, maybe like a small one. Maybe I want images that are really big. Maybe I want to emphasize on a point or something. I can put text on it. Put some broccolini. Maybe it's below the ball there or something, that's pretty cool. I might just add a quick bit of text. I'm just showing you how to set it up. So healthy habits, press Enter, a minute. I'm going to scale this up. You can see it's behind the bananas, so I add this cool effect. Then obviously I can add text in and tips in, stuff like that. I'm going to show you how to export it. So I'm just going to click, add in some text there. Maybe I want the text to go across two slides. I can just copy this. Maybe I want the text to go across two slides, you can also do that as well. But just be aware of legibility and readability. So that's looking cool. So that's fine. So what we're going to do now, is we're going to slice up all the slides now. So our Photoshop can recognize each one as a separate image. So press C and it should go to the Crop tool. So the crop tool would look like this. You want to click that, right-click and click the slice tool. You can see here, that it should be like a little knife thing and there's a button at the top that says, "Slices from guides." I want to click that and it automatically has made 10 slides. So you can see, one, two, three, four, all the way up to 10, as you can see there in a little corner of little blue text. So now we've got 10 slides and it made a base on these guys who created before. So in order to export 10 separate slides, now what we have to do is go to File, Export and we want to get to save for web. So this is important what you have to do here. So I'm going to zoom out. What do you have to do, is click on this original tab here. So click original, make the quality, you can make it a 100, that's fine. You can leave it on JPEG. You can also use a PNG as well, but I'm going to just save it as a JPEG for now. I'm going to click Save. You want to make sure that slices, it's set to all slices, and then you want to name it and you want to save it to wherever you're going to save it. I'm going to save it to the desktop and I'm going to press Save. So now on my desktop, I should have a photo, if I double-click and open it, just let me close this. Now you can see all the images is saved. So if I double-click and I'm just going to use my arrow casing and go through it. You can see it overlaps. Really cool, looking good. That's how you sort your document for Photoshop. Then what I'll do, I'll pretty much make a template, so you don't have to keep doing the guides and the slices again and just re-save it out. So every time I do new carousel, you just open it up and you can redo it. That's how you set up in Photoshop. 12. Setup + Export in Canva: All those non designers out there that may not have access to Photoshop or Illustrator, I'm going to quickly show you how to set up your carousels in Canvas. I have a free version of Canvas, but you can always get the provision if it's a long-term thing you're going to be using, but I'm just going to show you how to set it up so you want to get to the left-hand side. Once you're in your account, click ''Create a design'' and just typing Instagram in this little search bar here,and you can see you've got Instagram posts on Instagram story. I'm going to click on Instagram post, and you can see here we start off with an opcode. What I can do now is on the top right you see this little plus button. This is going to add a new page or a new upload. I'm going to just click that 10 times. Just leave your mouse in the same spot and just click. Now we've got 10 pages. What I can start to do is start to play around with different backgrounds, and I can drag some stuff. I can go to text and maybe I want to add some text or something so I can jump some text in there, I can also change the color of the text, I can delete that thing and I can edit. It can also add a heading as well, so if I want to drag and drop a heading, I can scale this up and maybe I want it down here. Here you got all your tools at the top so you can increase the spacing and all that's type of stuff and you can drag the box to make it really big which is pretty cool. The only thing though, is that if you want to overlap stuff like certain images or photography or stuff like that, so you might have a photo or something like that. What tends to happen is, let's just say I have an image because the boards are not right next to each other, it's a little bit hard. You could Control C can paste it here, and you can roughly eyeball it. If I double-click key, you can see I can move the photo like this. Maybe I can line it up or whatever. But you can see it's a little bit tricky, so I'll try and keep the apples really simple. Maybe just have a simple background, maybe a textured background or just a simple color or shape just to make it really easy and just put clear bold text on it. I'll make this wide. This is just primarily showing you how to set it up. Once you have all the 10 apples, what you do is you go to the top right and click ''Download'' and then what you want to save it is a PNG should be fine, but you can also save it as a JPG. I'm just going to save it on PNG for now. What it's going to do, make sure you select All pages here, and we didn't need transparency. That should be all fine and we'll click download. Let's now download the photo with all the pages. I'm going to extract the zip folder. Then you can see all the pages are there. You can actually upload it. Obviously, I didn't design all of them, so some of them are white. But you can see you just upload all of these into your creative studio, all the 10 of them, and it will be a carousel post. 13. Setup in Google Slides: I'm going to show you quickly how to set up your carousel in Google slides. Maybe, you didn't have illustrator or Photoshop you can set up and do a carousel actually, in Google slide is pretty cool and it works both for PC and Mac. But yet it all works online as well. You can also make copy to save a template out, all you need is a G-mail or Google subscription. I'm pretty sure to have it, so let's get sucked into it. The first thing first is when you open a Google slide, you'll get this basic layout with the text boxes is here, and the basic 16 by nine format. But we don't want this. We want to change the format to make it for Instagram. What I'm going to do is go to file and we want to go down to "Page setup". I'm going to click that. You can see the page setup is widescreen for 16 by nine. We're going to click the "Drop-down menu", include "Custom". Then what I'm going to do, I'm going to change it from inches to pixels. Then I'm going to type 1080 by 1080, which is the size of Instagram, and it's pretty much a one-to-one square. I'm a click "Apply". Now you should see your page should be set up for the Instagram size. I'm going to just select these text boxes and delete that. Then what I'm going to do, I'm going to go to my left-side where the had the slide. I'm going to press "Control C" and then "Control V", nine times the crate ten carousels. You can see here, I have 10 slides on the left. What I can actually do to change a background on the slide, you click on the "The effects of themes". You can see background layout, theme transition. You also can insert images, text boxes and shapes and things like that. I'm going to click "Background" first and I'll change maybe, I want the background to be black. I can press "Done". I can also add it to the theme as well if I want. If you do that, it will add all of the same color to the background of all your slide. Maybe you have a brand color, you can do that to add it. Then now, if I want to add text, I can go to insert and click, "Textbooks" and drag it textbooks in this slide. I'm going to change the font. I'll click "Proximal". I will change the size to about a 100, and then I'll go to the middle potty and change the text to white. Then I'll start typing like this. Then maybe it's a bit thin, so I'll go to Proxima Nova. See if it's a font that has multiple weights, I can select extra bold, which is really cool. To add an image, what you have to do is go to insert and click "Image". You can search for the web or you can upload from computer. Maybe, I have some images here, going to quickly upload something. Maybe I want chocolate. I've updated this image into here, and what I can do is I can scale it down. When you scale it from the corners, so it keeps the proportions. Maybe, I wanted to eat and then I can always go ahead and adjust the font. You can adjust the letter spacing here. You can see if I select everything and just letter spacing make it double, make it single. I can do a numbered list. I can do a dot list. That's how you can create those elements. You can do custom spacing as well. Maybe I want 0.8 and you can see that's a better spacing. Then I can actually fit my image here, it's pretty cool. If you want to do an overlapping effect. What I'll do is, I'll put my image and make it maybe bigger. I can always adjusted texts as well. In order to have an image that you transition over two slides, what you have to do is you press "Control C", go to the second slide. I'm going click on "The left to my second slide", press "Control V" to paste it. Then what we want to do is we're going to format option. Select your image, click on the "Format options" up the top-left here. You'll get all these options here. What we want to do is go to put-down two position. You'll see that the position is based on the top-left. We want to change this to the center. Then all we have to do is literally put a minus in front of the X-value and then click "Off". Now you have the image on the left-hand side and it's directly relative to this image here. When you slide across, it's going to be exact on the other half of it, the way you want it. Which is really cool. You could do that for all images. Once again, you just format it and just put a minus on the X-value instead of like dragging it and trying to figure out the exact position, you don't want to do that. You want- 14. How to Structure Carousels: Jump into some Instagram Carousel Tips, and I'll be talking about layout, a bit of structure and how to critique your designs so they stand out. The first three things I want to talk about is these three pillars is what your ideas of your carousels should be about. They either should be educational, entertaining, or informative. If the educational, you've got to ask yourself, ''Will someone learns something from this?'' It could be a skill, maybe a teaching, a tutorial or something. How to design a logo. That'll be something of an educational source. Entertaining, think about your personality. Is it playful? Is it fun? Is it whimsical and wacky? If so, then how can you portray that in your carousels with imagery, with the design, with the layout, with maybe the typography can be a little bit wee, and witty, and bold, that could relate with an entertaining vibe. Number 3, is informative. Does the information help someone? Will this topic, skill, or idea give any insights or strategy to someone? Typically, your content can be one of these or can be all of these. It doesn't really matter. Just it's good to mix it up and not just do one. Unless you want to really niche down and that's totally fine. Here are just some examples of what I think a good cover layout would be. The main thing of a cover, of course, is to get attention and attract people to click on it. It's the same thing as YouTube. You need to have a good thumbnail or no one's going to click on it. Here's a couple of ideas, you can see here. I will just put the text title, so that can be a potential title of your texts. Obviously it doesn't have to be caps lock and bold, even though I recommend it should be bold and big. You can design it the way you want, but I'm just giving some suggestions. You can put some imagery like these with some hierarchy in the center. You can have the text on the left and have an image that overlaps over two slides may be. You can have an image coming from the left or right. It doesn't really matter. Or just have it all centered. Well, maybe you want to have an image on the top or bottom and have the text adjacent to that. It's totally up to you, or you can have all texts with like a faded out background image if you want, or even just a color. Those are the few ideas. I hope they spark some inspiration on doing some cover layouts. I want to talk about how to structure your carousels. I'm going to give you two simple examples. The first one being one that's more educational and informational. The first slide is always about attention. As I said before, you need to attract attention and get people to swipe left on the carousel. It needs to look interesting. It needs to look engaging. If it's not, then you're going to run into some issues. The second slide should be a hook. Typically what I do, I put a question or I pose a thought which draws them in. It has a bit of mystery to it. It's like drawing them in to say, ''Oh, I'm going to answer the question. Or what's next?'' I try and hook them with that. It can even be a quote or just something interesting. Then the next five slides after the hook, is you want to be showing the problem. Explain a pain point or a struggle and also share from your experience. Don't just copy content from online or other people. Try and share things you've learned on your own journey, in your own experience. Because you can relate with them better and other people can relate with you as well because it's just honest and transparent. After the problem slides, what you want to do is deliver value. You can teach a tip, give advice, give something of value that someone can learn from it. Then the second last slide will be the solution. Typically, I summarize my main point into like a checklist or dot point list. You can also put the tips there or you can put like actionable steps that someone can do so they can solve that issue that they're having in their life. Maybe they have like bad pricing, like mind-set about pricing and then maybe you can summarize dot points on like how to get over a negative mindset about money. Do this, this, this, this. That's just an example. Then the last slide is the CTA, which means call to action. You want someone to act. Because on Instagram it's about engagement in social media, you need them to engage with the content. For example, you want them to comment. I typically ask a question on the last slide and that's relevant to the first main point that I made at the start. Then I get them to comment below like, ''What are your thoughts? What's your experience? Do you have a story to share?'' Then it helps them to engage on the carousel. The second one is pretty much similar. It's just another version just to help you guys understand it a bit better as well. Once again, first slide is attention. Second slide is drawing interest. You can draw them in with a quote, an image, or even a thought and then this one's more about storytelling. It can be entertaining. It can be about a theme, or an idea, or a thought, or something you're trying to communicate across or a revelation you've had. You would explain the story through your own experience or your own understanding or through your worldview and your lens. At near the end, you give value in value. You help them get the main point across and how it can benefit their lives. How it has a positive impact if they do these things. Then once again summarize show the outcome, the benefits, and also the main takeaways of that story or maybe it's the hero of the story or whatever you idea is. Once again, the call to action. You want to inspire with the main point, so it can be aspirational. Inspire someone to take action. Also, you can get them to share their experience or opinion below. You can just say, ''Oh, let me know your thoughts.'' That's what I do. You can do something else, you don't have to copy me. You can do like, ''Drop a line. Drop me a DM.'' Stuff like that. 15. [New] How often to post?: How often should you post? I get this question all the time. There is no straight answer but I can give you some of my experience and my advise on how often you should post. Should you do daily? Should you do it every second day? Maybe once a week. At the end of the day, you need to find something that works for you because some people might grow faster doing daily posts and some people just might grow through just doing a few times a week so you need to find what works for you.That's why you need to experiment and test it out on your page. If you do daily, what happens is it increases the chances of being seen and engaged with. Every time your audience or follower is on the platform, if you're posting every day, it increase the chance of them coming across it on their posts or unexplored page or on their feed so that's why if you do a daily, you increase those chances of someone locking or interacting with that post. Not only that, but it keeps you top of mind, so that they could consider going to be seeing you everywhere all the time and they're constantly going to be viewing content. Daily is one of the best ways to do it, but it takes a lot more effort and hard work to constantly put out content every day. If it's non-daily, maybe it's every second day or every three days. What happens is it decreases the chances for the algorithm to suggest your content. Because what happens is when people interacted their content, it puts in data to the system saying that people liked your content. What happens is the algorithm starts showing it to more of your audience, so typically that's how it works. Your chances increase if it's daily if its not daily, then there only going to see it every few days, right? But whatever schedule you pick, it doesn't matter because your audiences become used to that system every week. The more people that like and share and comment and save your post, it keeps people on the platform for longer. It's really key that you make sure that people are doing all these things and record the actions that you want them to see asking those right questions to help people share and like it. The more it happens, the more it's going to keep people on the platform and the algorithm loves when people stay on the platform for longer. As I just said, the Instagram Algorithm wants people to stay on the platform as long as possible. That's all Instagram cares about. It's AI generated. They just care about keeping people on the platform for the longest. Because the longer they stay on the platform, the more chances they're going to see an ad and Instagram makes more money. If you can keep them on board with creating great content, great carousels if your using stories and everything like that, it's going to help you in the long run. Create a schedule that works for you. I do daily because I am used to it and I am really quick with illustrated and creating carousel so for me it works. For other people they have day jobs, they've got freelance work and heat some other projects to do so that they can't do that, right? Some people will grow with daily posts, some grow posting few days a week, I have friends who only post a few times a week and they've got 30,000 followers, right? But the quality that they put out is amazing, so consistency in quality, content always wins when you do your best work. I will reiterate it that again, when you do it over time and people will start to notice because you're posting such quality content and always helps you win. Make sure you're showing up every day; Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Do what you can if you can't do daily then challenge yourself maybe seven days try doing it for a week. Challenge yourself to get yourself out there and dominate. 16. Where to Find Images: What I'm going to show you now some really great sites you can use to get free, but also a paid images that you can use in your carousel, you can use it for client work, for any marketing material as well. They really useful, they're royalty free, and I think these sites will really help you especially when you're going to create your carousels. I'm going to show you some free ones first. First one is Pexels. Great site. Really cool. Does have some interesting photos and it's got a wide variety as well. Obviously, this one is a free site, so it's limited. If you want to sit on top of picture, you may not find it on it. But they're very high quality, high res, and they're very interesting and you can click free download and download it. They got large sizes as well, which I liked, which is really awesome. The next one is Unsplash. Unsplash is amazing. The quality of photos are really good because it's from photographers and people who travel and things like that.. They really get a lot of really interesting photos. Once again, they're royalty free and they're very high res. You can see, I'm just scrolling through. You've got all these different types of categories at the top end side, which you can click through and look at, when you click on an image, you can put them in collections and then you can download for free, and they very high res. The downfall is that the files will be bigger, so you'd have to get a Photoshop and make them a bit smaller because they're row files, and they can be up to five megabytes sometimes, or even be more. Just keep that in mind, when you're looking at photos but really great site, I recommend it. Number three is Pixabay. This is another free site as well, similar to pixels and unsplash. The quality of the photos are okay. They're not too crazy. You can see some koalas, so, some kangaroos, which is interesting. It's pretty useful, you can check it out and you can download it like as usual. Similar free download here, for commercial use as well no attribution required. So that's totally cool as well. Now, I'm going to show you some paint sites that I really recommend that will help you. Number one is Adobe Stock. Adobe Stock is bit more on the expensive side, but what you can do is you can sign up for a free trial where you can get about ten images. So if you want to play around and do a test carousel, I'd recommend maybe delegate trial for Adobe Stock in downloading images and playing around with it. I've used Adobe Stock before, not only that they get videos, vectors, illustrations, templates, and they all work in all the Adobe products. So I definitely recommend it. The photos are really really good quality. It's just that the price point is high, and if a constant thing that every month, it could be an expense that you don't want to pay over time, so just keep that in mind. There's another called Stocksy. These ones are recommended as well, their photos are really cool, very creative shots, all types of soften categories. If I can click on spring, you can see I got some floral stuff hat action happening here, that's a cool effect there. Is a very creative shots, very nice, very interesting. They also got videos as well. So you can see you can just search for photos or videos and the price point I think it's like 29 or 25 or something like that a month, but you get unlimited. Isn't like Adobe Stock you're limited or like even Charles Stock, you're limited just an amount. This one is just like a limited amount, which is pretty cool. The main ones, I use it a moment. I'll show you now I use Twenty20 stock and they got all these different collections and different stuff that I can use. They've got heaps of photos which I like as well of people, of objects, landscapes, nature, all these different type of stuff. This is part of my subscription that I've purchased on inverter elements. So if you pay for it, it's about $30 a month. If you buy an annual subscription, it's like 20 bucks a month. So that's really good. Definitely when get a subscription, you can just message me and I can send you a link because I do get a bit of commission, but I'm not trying to promote them, honestly, just saying because I used them and they're actually really good. So you get the Twenty20 photos, but they actually also have photos inside inverter as well on itself. So if I click in here, you can see all these photos and I can filter out certain stuff, and they got so much stuff, like you don't just get photos, you get plight packaging. You get stock video, templates, music, sounds, fonts, even look at the fonts, if I just really quickly show you, if it works. So you can see you've got some cool fonts here, for tapping coffee, you've seen Neolithic vintage stuff. That's awesome. Really good inverter elements. Definitely check it out, the photos are worth it. 17. Selecting Images for Carousel: Once I've selected an ID, I'm going to go with the jungle type of theme, adventure/explorer type of theme. I'm going to minimize this and just go straight into finding photos. Let's begin. What I'll do, I thought of the idea of a compass. A person traveling on a journey. I typed in compass and I typed in on both sites and then I start to scroll through to see the top of images that I think that are good. You can see I already started going through a couple of these pages. I can look around and I'll do the same for the other site as well. I'm multitasking, just looking on both sites. I got two monitors, so it's easy to look at two sites and I'm just scrolling through looking for the right image. The right image is very important. You got to make that selection because it needs to pop on, especially if it's going to be your first slide, it needs to be really cool. I liked them more with the hands. I want one with the hand with a compass out. I found one over here which I like, and then I can go and Photoshop and edit it. I like this one here or even this one, looks very nice. This one's closer. I think I'll probably go with this one here, a man with compass in hand. I'll download this. I'm just going to download it. What I'll do, I'll drag the file for my downloads folder into a folder I just made and I'm going to drag into images. I'll start to put all my images here and click to View and I'll start the dragging them all in here. I probably need about four to five images. My last slide is taken care of. The main image is going to be the first one, which is the key one that's going to attract people to click on the actual carousel. What I've done is I've started typing jungle and to see what we find here. The whole idea is that the journey is not straight in our path, like people think all the time. There can be some challenges, there can be some difficulties and understanding that it's about the journey, it's about the adventure. It's about the process that you go through, the decisions you make, the people you meet, all the sub things. What I'm looking for is looking for an interesting jungle image. I'll just start to go through all these pictures and if you can't find the right picture, then it might be good to buy a picture from another place, maybe on certain other stock sites or maybe make it yourself or go take a photo, go down to the bush, or something or wherever you're located and you take your own photo and figure it out. But that would be my suggestion. This is how I gather all my images. Then I'll start to lay it out in Illustrator. 18. Choosing Fonts: I'm going to just show you a few suggestions on fonts and the right type of fonts you should be using. Then I'm going to give you some sites you can download some of these free fonts, which is really cool. You want to be using a condensed font. You don't want to use some weird fonts. For example, if I go over here, you can see, I've got some different fonts. I got a really curly script font, this is a slab serif. This one is just a geometric form, which is fine. Then this one's more of a serif font. But you can see here all these fonts are the same size but you can see these ones don't fit. If I have to make it all fit out, I'll have to scale it down and then try and make all my headings fit. I'll try and avoid these fonts. You can use script fonts and stuff like that, but just use it sparingly. But you can see these fonts here, the first one is called Bebas or Bebas Neue which is a free one.Then I've got BW stretchy, uniform and attractive condition. You can see these are very condensed, they're very bold. They have multiple styles so if I want to go thinner, I can do that. As you can see here, is just a lot more flexible and a lot more useful for this type space because it's a square, so we want to try and make sure it's all the same. You can see all these fonts are the same size so they're 203 points right now. These are the same size as well, but it just doesn't fit, you can see. You want to have a condensed bald heading fonts. I'll just keep my fonts as a sans-serif, which means it doesn't have any endings or tails on the ends, its just a simple straight shape, which is cool. I'm going to go to font Squirrel, these are free fonts. There are a 100 percent commercial use, royalty-free. What I want you to do is once you go to the homepage, on the homepage you'll see all these fonts here and then on the side you will have a filter list. What you want to do, you want to click on Headings, so down here headings, then I also want to click Condensed so you can see condensed here, where the mouse is, click that and then now it's going to filter all the fonts that are condensed and that are heading. If I scroll down, you can see Bebas is here, I have got all these other ones, Antonio, Cooper Hewitts, and Dosis all these different ones. Obviously some look lighter but some might have a couple of styles. You can see it tells you how many styles it has. You can see it's got two styles three styles, which means it might come with like a bold, a regular and a thin or like a heavy semi bold, something like that. You want to try and find with multiple styles because then it's more flexible. Obviously there's not too many options here, but definitely there's something here that you could use for your brand and your carousels, which I think would be super awesome. Another amazing site that I've used in the past is called Fontfabric. What you can do is you can click on Free Fonts on the right here, they recently updated there site which is super cool. You can also click the top left click on the drop down, click Browse Fonts and just go to free fonts. Obviously some of the free fonts are not a complete set. They'll just give you a couple styles and then you have to buy the rest, but that's up to you. I really recommend buying a font because then you can use it later on the track for client work or anything like that and I feel it's a lot more better. You can see you've got a couple good ones. You got Mont looks cool. Uni Neue looks all right. Akrobat that one's a free one, which I've clicked on already so you can see this one completely free. You can see the licensing here. Obviously you can use it for carousels, so it's fine, but you can see here how its got all bold and different whites. This is really good and it's really condensed, which I like a well. I'm just looking for this condensed font is really simple, not going to crazy. Go test that looks nice, Zona Pro is good. Canter is all right. I'm trying to look for those sensor font. Just go through here explore it and try and find something that you know a bold headline that is condensed so you can use it for your carousels. 19. Selecting Colours: I received this suggestion on how to select the right colors for doing Instagram Carousels. But for design in general, there are principles. It doesn't honestly matter what colors you use. Obviously, you want it to represent your personality, your brands, who you are, what you stand for, and you want to make it somewhat relative to your audience. What I have here is just a couple of examples, and I'm going to show you a live example on selecting colors. What you want is good contrast. You can see, I have just pure black in the background and then I've got four different text here with different colors. I got white, yellow, green, and red. You can see here that even though these are very saturated, they're okay on the black, it's very readable. But I wouldn't overuse the saturated colors, I would keep it mainly white or gray or something like that. If I go to the white, you can see this text now. It doesn't look good on white. It honestly makes it more harsh because with white, the spaces around it is not constricted, so it just seems like it's floating. It's hard to read. It's not as legible. But obviously the green and red are okay, but the yellow or a bright pink, and things like that wouldn't be that good on white. You can see I have a gray here which is okay. You got to be careful with the saturated colors and what you pick. I went to Carousel Color and got a quick example here and I'll show you how to use it. I always recommend trying to get a color palette that has dark tones, and a bright primary color, and then maybe some neutral tones like grays and stuff. I feel like this is a good palate here. You can see here I've the dark version with the black, and then I got the blue and the white and gray and these all look good on the black, which is cool. Then I have one with the blue colors here. You can see the Navy works. This dark gray doesn't look as nice on the blue. Then I've got this gray-white color. Then what if I grabbed all these and brought it over so I can put it on the whites. Let's see what that looks like. Once again, all these are fine. They have a decent amount of contrast, not too saturated. They can work on the white which I feel like is really cool. Let's jump to colors.com. I feel like this is one of the best sites you guys can use if you're struggling with colors. It's colors.com and you can click up the top. You got all your menus on the top right, so you can click generate. You can pretty much generate different color. If I select these colors, you can see I can adjust it, I can drag, I can look at alternate shades. If I click alternate shades, you can see it gives you a lot of shades and I can click and change it, I can drag it across, I can adjust it, if I want. If I want more like purple or blue. I feel like these are really cool. You can generate your own colors and then it gives you the hex code down the bottom here. If you don't want to do it this way, you can just go to "Explore". On the top right click "Explore". You can see on this page it gives you a whole bunch of different color schemes. It has got the names there. What you can do if you like one, you can actually put your mouse over and click "Save" which will save it to your account or you can click "Export". If I click "Export", all you have to do is just click PNG. Then I have this pallet, so you can save it. Right-click and you can click "Save Image As" or you can just click "Copy Image" and go to illustrate and then press "Control V" and it should paste it in like that. Then I'll just extract the colors from the image. I'll create a shade. I'll press L or M maybe to make a box, and I'll select this and press I for the Eye dropper tool. You can see my mouse is on the Eye dropper. Then I'll start sampling these colors. I'll then duplicate it by holding "Shift" and "Alt", or if you're in a Mac it's "Option", press I, for the Eye dropper, select the color, "Shift" and "Alt" to duplicate. Press I for the Eye dropper, select color. Duplicate, Eye dropper, select color. You can see, now I have this pallet and what I can do now as a shortcut, I can select it all and then I can go to my Swatches panel, which I'll bring over here. Click this folder down the bottom right, new color group, select it, convert process to Global colors. I can get rid of that and just call it Carousel Colors, press "Okay". Then now, it's added that color group into a folder here, then whenever I'm working on stuff, I can just select the colors here really easily. Cool, that's really awesome. Let's go and explore some other pallets real quickly. Once again, what I'm looking for is a nice balance of colors, not too many bright colors. I want a bit of contrast. Something that I can use. This one looks cool, so I'll do this one, a bit of orange. I like these blue-gray tones, this black. I feel that's cool. I'll show you a quick example. If I want to have a dark one, you can see here the orange works really well, the cream is okay, and the red is a bit harsh on the black, that's totally fine. Maybe the cream, or the gray, or the orange, and I'll test it out. You always want to test stuff out to see what it looks like. Always test the white and see how the cream looks on that. White always looks good on darker backgrounds as you can see. We can do a gray or black, see what the black looks like. I'm just sampling the colors using the Eye dropper tool. You can see black looks good on the orange. If I selected it, the red is still okay as well. It is a lot of reds so just be careful with that. Yeah, just like experiment, play around with it. 20. Typography Basics : I wan to show you four basic typographic tips that you can apply to your layouts. The first one is white space. I'm just going to show you a quick example. You can see a lot of my designs have a lot of white space. You can see there's a lot of space around the text. Obviously, in the bottom here and in here, I can place an image or whatever else. You would imagine that there's a box or square around the text. I put this little box here just to show you. I'm not putting the typography right next to the edge because for fonts and typography, you need a lot of spacing. It gives it room to breathe. You want the text to breathe, you want people to be able to read it really simply. You're not going to even space this out as well. But obviously if I keep spacing it out, it'll not become legible unless there's a creative style, or something specific that you're trying to do, then you can do those things, but try and leave some room around the edges and just make sure that you can have some room to breathe and let the text have space so people can clearly see what it is. Another thing is legibility. I've been seeing a lot of people doing texts like this when they're putting it right next to the edge, or it's getting cut off. Unless it is a certain style then once again, don't do it. Obviously, I can space these out, but yeah, you don't want to have things too close to the edges. It just feels like it's cramped and it's closing in on the typography and the design. Let's put this back. Obviously, using imagery as well, don't put a little tiny image in the corner. It just doesn't look good. It doesn't convey the message well, and there's all these empty white space here which is not balanced, as you can see. I just did a quick version of it that could look better. Also, you can see I made the takes smaller. I spaced out the spacing between the lines. I have also moved this, aligned it to the left so you can see these two are aligned together. I made this lady doing lunges. I made it bigger. It feels a lot cleaner, feels better. It's a nice balance of white space and clearly your eye will go like this and consume that content as you can see here. I feel like that will work a lot better. Another thing is type sizing. When you're creating a lot of content, maybe have a lot of content that's text-heavy instead and you are not using much images, it can be a little crazy and hard to read, especially at small sizes. You can see here, I've got this bold font that I'm using and there's a lot of texts. It'll be hard to read. It's very harsh on the eyes. Instead of doing a lot of text like this, try and simplify your message and simplify the text. To improve this, what I've done is actually just added a headline, made this bold, and then made the text bigger and decrease the text. Maybe I cut down the content and just put the key message here. You can see it already looks a lot better with the space and you are able to read it. Clearly there's some hierarchy there. This leads us on to hierarchy. You want to have hierarchy when it comes to your design. You don't want to have random elements all over the place. You can see here, I've clearly got a heading which is more bolder and bigger. Then I've got body text. The body text is going to be smaller and obviously thinner. I'm using regular for these signs. You can see I can make it bolder, but I don't want to make it too bold so I can go medium, regular. Light might be too thin, so I tend to stick within the medium range. There's enough space there. Then down the bottom, I've got my profile tag and my website. You can put a logo there, you can put other stuff, maybe a link or something like that to your certain stuff, just depends on your goals. Obviously, I've put a swipe left icon on the right. This is here. It's all about hierarchy. If I've moved this around, I'm not going to have my body text up here and then my heading down here and my tag somewhere over here. It just wouldn't make sense. People read from left to right. A majority of people do because from English or Western societies. Typically that's how it works. I feel like this is a nice layout and good hierarchy. Just an example of hierarchy. You can see here clearly I have a big bold heading on the left. I've got my image on the right. Then I've got my tag and an arrow on the bottom here. People start from the corner. They start from the corner and then they come down like this, and they read like this. Then obviously the eye would jump like this as well and come down here. That's how the eye will move throughout the image. That's your headlines. All important texts on the top left corner. Then other things on the bottom left or on the bottom right corner here, and then the image can take up that space. That's just a few basic typographic tips that you can apply to- 21. How to Cut Images in Photoshop: Let me show you how to cut out an image, especially a person. I'm going to be cutting up myself because on my Instagram carousels, I'm all about building a personal brand, so I tend to use my picture myself, but you can also use it when you're cutting out other people, or animals, or objects, it all looks the same. I'm just going to show you a quick example. First I'm going to show you this cool program which you can use. It's actually called removebg, so that website is called remove.bg, and it allows you to upload a photo and it will automatically cut the person off the background, which is super useful. The only issue is that the free version only lets you save a small-res version, not high-res, but it will cost about $0.30 or something like that if you want the large version. If I just click pricing, you got to buy a certain amount of credits. One image is $2.90, or if you buy a subscription, a monthly thing, then o cost equivalent to $0.30 an image, which is useful. You can think about that, it might be useful if you don't like using Photoshop, and it's too hard then this is an option and a good investment. For example, if I have my image, I'm just in Adobe Bridge, you can just normally look at it in a photo. If I grab this image, and drag it, drop it onto the actual page, you'll see what's going to happen. It's going to upload, so you can see look what it did, it automatically cut out the image of the background, and now I can download it. You can see the full image is this res spot that's for the pro and this is the size, we can save it as well. I can just download that. You can see all downloaded PNG, super useful, and I'll just drag it over here. Now you can see I got this image, and I can just drag and drop it into Illustrator just like that. If I go to my download folder, and obviously it's low res, so it's going to be pixelated, especially if you're trying to scale it up onto your carousel, the quality it might be pixelated, but if it's something small, people might not notice, that's a quick tip as well, they probably won't notice. I'm going to show you how to cut it in Photoshop because only way better. Once you have your image, once you've taken on your phone or camera, you want to get that image and you want to drag it into Photoshop. It doesn't matter what the canvas sizes for now we can just leave it. What I'm going to show you how to do is cut it out. We're going to do the top left corner you've got your Photoshop menu, and we want to click on ''Select'' now what we want to do is want to click ''Subject'' If you didn't have the new version of Photoshop, you might not have this option so I encourage you to actually update it. Amongst the click ''Subject'' what it's going to do, it's going to automatically find the main object or subject, in this case it's me folding my arms, and it's going to make a selection. You can see if I zoom in, you've got the little selection, which is also called the marching ants. You can see there in my selection, and it did a pretty good job. Obviously, some of the hair is cut off, but we're going to fix that. You can see my ears cut off as well, which is a bit weird as well, but that's totally cool. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to go to my layers panel on the right hand side and click the ''Vector mask'' It's a square with the circle in the middle, the black circle. Now you can see in my layers panel on the right hand side, you can see I have my layer here, and I've got my vector mask, which is hiding all the background. All that is showing is now as just showing me here. Now what I can actually do is I can edit this mask that I made. You want to make sure you select on the vector mask, so you can see the little white lines there. It shows you which part of the layer is selected. You'll want to select the one that's next to the image. I'm going to zoom in. To zoom in you hold ''Alt'' or ''Option'' if you're on a Mac, and you just use your mouse wheel to zoom in really fast. To move around the page, what you do is you press the ''Space bar'' and ''Left-click'' and you can literally drag the page around like this if you zoomed in, makes it really cool. I'm going to zoom in, and first, what I'm going to do is start to find some the part that got cut-off like my ear. I'm going to press ''B'' for the ''Brush Tool'' I'm going to start painting here. You can see what it's doing is actually erasing me which I don't want. I have to change my swatch to actually the white color instead of black, because black hides white reveals. I'm going to press ''Shift X'' I'm still on my ''Brush Tool'' I haven't changed my tool. What happens is the swatch is changed now I'm on white. Now I can ''Left Click'' and just drag and now paint where the ear is. Obviously you don't want to get too far because I'm painting in the room again. I can Control Z that and just paint that. Obviously people are not going to notice this firing because it's so tiny. Don't worry about all the little crazy parts. You can see here, look you can even see my iPhone here that I was holding in my hand. I could probably rub that out if I want, but I'm just going to leave for now. I'm going to zoom in, and just find all the little cracks and parts, and find if I need to rub anything out, before we fix the hair. You can see, I did a pretty good job. That's awesome. Now what I can actually do is I can go back to my layers I can increase so you guys can see. I'm going to select the image, and what I'm going to do now is go in. I just want to clean up a bit on my face because you see I got a little bit of a pimple here, which is totally cool. A quick tip, press "J" for the Healing Brush Tool, for the Spot Healing Brush Tool, super handy. What I'm going to do, make sure your layout and you select the image. I'm going to use the square bracket, which allows me to decrease and increase the size. Then I'm going to Left Click a couple of times around the areas that I don't want. You can see I got rid of it. If I want to get rid of a freckle or something, Zoom in or make the brush a bit bigger then the freckle and then click and it gets rid of it. It pretty much uses pixels from around that area, and duplicates it and blends it in. In case you're looking tired, you can maybe wrap it out, rub out your wrinkles or whatever. As you can see there. I'm not going to go too crazy. I just want to show you a quick tip there. What are we going to do now is we want to fix the hair, because the hair is not looking good. You can see what's going to happen now. What I'm going do now is I'm going to press Alt Control R. The shortcut is also here. If you go to select, select and mask. The shortcut is Alt Control R. Measure your layout selected. I'm going to select this. Now you can see, you want to change the view to overlay. The reason why is because you can't really tell when it's on transparency, so I like black because I can see the edges there, as you can see. If I Zoom In, I can see what's happening here. Once you got to view on the right-hand side, you click "Overlay", which is totally cool. Then I just leave it on high-quality preview, which is fine. Now what I want to do is I want to go to the right, and go to the bottom, go to Output settings, and you want to select Decontaminate Colors. As you click this, pay attention to the white outline on the hair. You can see what I, did is it got rid of that rim light of that white part, and just made it brown on the hair there, and should've adjusted all over the body as well. It gets rid of that reflection on the edge, which is really cool. Now what we're going to do is we're going to make it, so it gets rid of all these little gaps and things there that makes it look natural. What we're going to do is on the left-hand side, you can click the second one, and this one is Refine Edge. Click that's like a brush it like a little flames thing. What I'm going to do now, is I'm going to make sure that my brush is on, and I'm going to make the size just a little bit bigger than the edge. If you do too big, it's going to mess up the hair. If I make it this big and select, you can see it starts messing up all these other stuff and pixels. We don't want that. Controls Z, I'm going to make the brush really small and just go along the edges, Left Clicking, and just dragging over the white parts and over the hair a bit. You can see as I'm doing that is actually making the hair look natural again, and getting rid of all that white and it's revealing all those little strands, because you know how hair has strands. It's not flat, right? I'm just going along the edge very finally. I'm zoomed in and just left clicking, dragging all the way in. Drag it over here. Now you can see how all the little strands are there and it looks way better. Then you can go back. I just don't want to ever do it because the pixels can start to act a bit weird sometimes. Then from this, what I can do is I can actually improve the radius, I can make it more smooth if I want. I can feather it a little bit as well. It starts to blur out the hair a bit. To be honest, you don't really have to do with that much, you can see it start blurring it out too much. I don't necessarily need to, but you can probably add like a tiny bit. To be honest, I would just leave it typically on the default. Then I could go into other areas. You can see maybe the cheek is being a bit witty, because I've got some beard hair. [inaudible] If you've got hair anyway on your arms or anything like that, or you can do on an edge that's really rough. For example, see here, what happened is it's not able to because it's really fine, it can't really process it, that's around the edge of the skin there. It's better off just to leave it, and just make it chilled. Once we do that, what we can do is I can turn the view back to onion skin and I can click "Okay". Now what it's going to do it's going to make a new layer for you automatically with the new mask. Now I'm going to make a quick solid color, so you can go click on this button down here goes solid color, I can make it black or whatever color, and I can see what it looks like. I'll change the color maybe to my brand color, orange. I can see what it looks like. It looks way better, way cleaner, and it looks really good. If I go here, and I make a drop shadow, we'll see what that looks like. You can see they have a drop shadow now. That looks awesome. You can press "Okay". That looks typical. What I'm going to do now, I'm going to get rid of the effect. I'll turn off the color as well because I don't want to. I'm going to crop the image. I'll press "M" for the Marquee Tool, or the Rectangle Tool. I'm going to drag a box over me. What I'm going to go to image and click "Crop" This should crop the ends off and just make the image like this because when you drag into Illustrator or other programs, you don't want to have this big danny box, (phonetic) and it gets in the way of other stuff and other elements. You don't want that to happen. Now I have this, now what I can do, I can go to File, I can go to Export, and I can go to save for web. The shortcut is Control Shift Alt S as well. Now you can see, I can zoom in, I can see the detail. It's all there. I want to make sure that it's on PNG, because we want transparency. Make sure the transparency box is ticked as well. I'm going to zoom out a bit. What you can actually do it, you can keep the size big. You can also drop the size as well, because sometimes it takes a while to upload the file if that file is very big. If you're going to update on a website, then you want to make sure that it's a small file as well. I just dropped it down to- I put it on 60 percent, and I went to [inaudible] pixels, which is teleco. Transparency I'll press "Save" Locate the image sock, and I'm just going to save it to the desktop for now. I'll say Jeremy, folded arms. I can go to the desktop. I can locate it, and I can drag and drop it into Illustrator. Then boom their we have it. We have an image, you can see the hair is all sweet. Everything's fine. Now we can do whatever you want. I can lay out color behind it, and sought to add it into my carousels, as we said, the bit at the carousels. Hopefully, you can use it on objects, you use on so many things. This is the key way to get that affect, and put some images in your carousels. 22. Paper Cut Out effect in Photoshop: What I want to show you is how to do this really awesome effect, which you can do in both Illustrator and Photoshop. You can see this is what we did, we downloaded a vector paper, which I'm going to show you what a download and you can see I've added some color and me in the background there. I just like cool effect. You can see if I jump into Photoshop, I downloaded a similar one but with the same effect as well. It's really cool and we just use a simple vector mask. So if I go to freepik.com, you can see we can download the paper, so you want to type in torn paper. If you just scroll down, you can see some of these good ones here. You want to try and find one that has an opening sort of thing, like it's coming out, just has more in effect. I downloaded this one, so you can download one of these, whichever one you want. But you can select multiple ones. You can see that this one's pretty cool too. If you want the Photoshop one, you want to get a photo, you don't want it to be a vector because the other one's a vector. Right next to the search bar, you can click on the filter and you can click on free and photos and it should pop up the ones that you want. If I scroll down here, you can see I downloaded this one, but there's all these other ones you can download, which is really cool, really super. So you don't have to copy other people. There's so much variety you can choose which one you want. You can see here I've just created a up board, which is just one slide here. What I'm going to do is, once you've downloaded the file and you've extracted it, typically it comes in a zip folder. You'll get this file, which is in EPS, which means you can open it in Illustrator. You just double-click on it and this file should open like this. Then what you want to do is, typically it might come with the background, you can see I just delete it because I don't need it and I'll select all this. Make sure everything's selected on the one I want, I'll press control C and then control V to paste it in. I'll hold shift and I'll click and drag on the box so just that I can scale this up to the size I want it and I'll align it to the left side of the board. It's a big scale is time down. I can also do it this way as well. If I want to just do it like that, that looks cool as well. The thing is with these files, typically they have a lot of groups in them, so you can see there's all these shading and shadows and stuff. But I'm just going to focus on the middle section needs. You can see here there's a shadow file, so I'm going to select it and just press control too. You can get an object and lock it there as well. So if you got object and so you can go and lock here. I've locked up. Then now we have this file at the back. I'm just moving it to show you. So you can see we've got this file here and it's got stuff in the back. What I can do is actually double-click on this shape, it's a mask. I'll double-click on it, click inside and I'll click delete. Then we should have this mask here. We have this shape, but you can see it's still in a clipping group, so I'll go object, clipping mask and release. This should release any other objects inside that group. Now you can see on the top left corner, you can see it says path. Now we just have this path. I'm just going to make sure there's no other elements around, which is really cool. I'm just going to color it so you guys can see, this is the shape we want. Now what I want to do is I want to drag it back to where it was, exactly where it was. Awesome. So what I want to do now is actually use this shape of this mask and mask my face in it. I'm going to go to one of my photos, drag and drop it in. I'm going to scale it down and I'm going to scale it to, maybe I just want my eyes in there to have a cool effect. I will bring this object to the back, so you get objects arrange, send to back, like this. What we want to do is I want to select this shape, you can see it has the yellow line, I just colored it so you can see. I'm going to hold shift, select myself, click object, clipping mask make. The shortcut is control 7 or command 7. Once I click that, you can see here the effect is at the clipping mask, so my body is inside this shape. Now we get this cool effect. Then once again I can press control or 2 to unlock the shadows, so maybe the shadows are not dark enough. I can go to my transparency and click multiply. I can also go to gradient as well if I want to like customize it, but I'll just leave it at that for now. You can see here as well this paper affects, I might have to add onto it because there's some part missing there. Just keep that in mind as well. You might have to just tweak it as you got, but when draw the time you don't have to. So cool, now we have these cool effects, but maybe I want a color it in the background there. What I want to do is if I just duplicate this shape, so I'll hold Alt and drag this shape off. I'll just color it so you guys can see and I'll turn the transparency off. We had this shape and what I can do is just put it where I want it to be, so make sure it lines back up. It doesn't have to be perfect. Then I'm going to bring it to the back, so object, arrange, send to back. So now I have this color in the back, so it looks like the paper is peeling open and there's something in the background. So I can choose different colors, I can do whatever I want the. Yeah, it's really useful, really cool. Then we can add some text, something interesting and I can bring that to the back as well. The shortcut is control shift and if you use the square brackets, you can bring things up and down, as you can see. Starts to look a bit interesting, right? I'm playing around, maybe I want to flip this, experimenting and it is playing around with stuff. Now I'm going to jump into Photoshop and show you how to do this one. What I did is I dragged in the photo. So I"ll just turn these layers off so we can start afresh. You'll just have a thing and you might just have the white background. You want to locate the photo and drag and drop it inside the Photoshop file. I'm going to scale it up because you can see it's not the right sizing. This is 1080 by 1080 for the Instagram slide. I'll scale it and press enter. So now we have this shape. Now what I want to do is just ignore all these other layers, he just focus on the top layer. What I want to do is press W and this will help me get the magic one tool. If you can't see the wand, you want to press caps lock so it turn caps lock off. What I'm going to do, I'm going to click on the black color in the middle, I'm going to go to the right and you can see I'm selected on my right layer and I want I'm to click the vector mask at the bottom. So I want to click the layer mass which is at the bottom. So you can see it's like a square with a circle in the middle, I want click that. What happen now though, it's out of the mask but I cut everything else, but we wanted to flip it so it's inverted. So I want to go to my layers, which you can see on the right-hand side. All I have to do is press control I or command I and it should flip the mask to show the outside and hide the inside, so you can see that. So now all I have to do is bring in an image, press enter just to make sure that it solidifies it. Then now what I'll do is just bring the layer down under the paper layer and then I can just move myself around. If I want to scale, I can press control or command T and I can scale myself up. Really big if I want and you can see that it looks like I'm looking at you, press enter and there we have it. If I want to add a color, what I can do is I can add a layer. So if you go to this little bottom here, it's like a circle on the bottom, click that, click [inaudible] and I can pick any color I want, press okay and just bring this layer, click and drag it down under everything. So it's below is my layer, as you can see. So that is super awesome and you can use other images, so you can see a good example. Maybe I just want a photograph of like trees or whatever. It can be anything, works for everything. That's pretty much how you add the torn paper effect and I hope you will find it helpful. 23. Carousel Cover Slide Design: What I want to do is I'm going to starts a bit at the first slide of the carousel. I'm going to jump back into Illustrator and what I'm going to do is I'm going to make some guides. To make some guides, I'm going to press Control R, and it's going to bring up my ruler. You can see on the left-hand side and the top you'll see these like little black ruler here. What I can do is left click and drag and bring down a ruler. To turn them on, because obviously I can't see them there. You press Control and press the Semicolon. If you're on a Mac OB command semicolon. I can go on the left-hand side and drag a ruler out from there as well, like this and so you can see if I press Control semicolon, it'll turn them off and on, which is really handy. If you have a certain layout specifically layout that you have, you can use these guides. I'm going to press Control or Semicolon to actually allow me to select them now. I'm going to just let them drag them like this. I can keep the guides on this layer or I can put it on another layer. It doesn't really matter. It just depends on your workflow. But maybe I put my details and the bottom here or maybe I can hold out and shifted duplicate one. Maybe I key on the text and I keep my top ascend on the top there. I can just copy this guide as well, so I press Control C and then if I do Control shift or V, it should paste that guide on all the a boards. Now I can use this as a basis. If I make some text here, let's just put Hello. I'm going to bump this up really quickly, make it work. Then I can use these guides to place my texts so it can be consistent on all the slides. But if you're more of a playful brands and small fun and you don't really need guides and that's totally fine and showing you how to set it up in case you want to be perfect. But yeah, totally cool. What I'm going to do now is just lock this guides so I can't touch it and I can also turn them off as well for now. What I'm going to do, I'm going to focus on the first slide. What I do, I tend to just type out first I'll press T for the Type tool and left click once and then the thing's going to be called the journey or am I just call it journey. I want to make a white. Then I'm going to find my fonts. The font I use is BW Stretch. It's a paid font which you can find online and I use heavy or black, typically, nice and thick. You can see the pretty good and what I was able to scale it down. For this one I'm going to keep the journey up the top and at the back. My idea is I'm going to use this image that I have in my folder here, these are the image I got from finding those images. What I can actually do is I can actually use this image by itself software just dragging in here. Now, scale it up. So I could just use the image like this by itself and have the text like this and maybe I could do the texts like orange or black. That's totally cool. But if I wanted to make it more unique, what I can actually do is cut the sky out and then put the text behind the mountain so it looks like it's behind the mountains. That will be like super cool. I'm going to go into Photoshop and drag the image in here. The thing is, it's going to make the interesting, more intriguing, more interesting and exciting and it's going to look like it has dimension to it. What I can do now is I can use my brush or I can use the pen tool. For this one, I'm going to use the pen tool. I'll press P for the pen tool and if you have caps lock on, make sure that it's off because then it will have the pen tool so you can turn off and on to just check. What I'm going to do, I'm going to go to these mountains at the back and the pen tool works the same as an illustrator. I'm going to go through these mountain parts of the photo. There's other ways of selecting, but I just find this will be very quick. It doesn't have to be perfect because it's blurred out at the back anyway. Then I'm going to go to click on the outside and you can see here, I had that path. What I have to do now is go to the Paths, so on my right here, I'll just make this large so you can see. You can see next to a layers you got channels and paths, you should have that by default. What I can do is on a press Control and left-click on the work path as you can see. What it will do will turn that pen tool path into actual selection. Now you can see you get the marching ends. Which is now a selection. I'll go back to my layers panel. Click on the Photograph layer which is layer 0, gave it to the corner and the bottom right and click the Vector Mask icon, which is like an empty circle in a square and a rectangle. I click that and you can see it left the sky, but it cut everything else. What I have to do is press Control I, and that should invert the selection as you can see, what's happening in my vector mask layer. You can see here I've got my normal picture and then I've got the vector mask on the layer. Black hides and white shows. What it does, it flips the white and the black. It's a good tip there. Always remember that white will show reveal and black always hide stuff in the darkness there. Now you can see cool, that selection and the mountains, the sky is cut out but the mountains are there and some of the angles might be a little bit sharp, that's totally cool. I could just go and use my brush. If I have the victor mask I can press B for the brush and a cool tip is that you make the brush lights and make the hardness at zero. I would make a big brush and more you do is you lightly tap and it blows out the edges there. Obviously, we don't want to do this because it's going to make parts of it invisible, but you can zoom in and you can paint along the edge to make it like a soft edge. You can see it's like it's most soft there, as you notice, I can press Control Z to go back, but I'm happy with this. What I'll do, I'll press Control, Shift or S and this will bring up the image which says "Save for web", is a quick way to save your images out. That I tend to like. You can see the image size is 6000 by 4000. It's big, got it really necessarily lead that much. I can go down to [inaudible]. If I type it in the percentage, it will drop it down to 3,000. Oversee, whatever the image is, just use a percentage and drop it down in a lower at negative 50, maybe 30, 20 percent and it just makes it a bit smaller. Because you don't need to make the image that big because it doesn't make the file bigger. Then what I'm going to do, I'm going to go click where it says JPEG intended to PNG 24. Mostly when I just zoom in a bit, so you can see what's happening. I have PNG, you want to take transparency. This means it's going to make the image transparent. I'm happy with the sizing. Everything is fine, so that's what you have to do and press Save. Then what I'll do, I'll save it in the same folder where way my files are. We all the images out to save it and I'll save it as first slide image and then usually type like PNG or something. Once it's done, you go back to the images. Now, you can see here I've got my image here. I'm going to click and drag it into my Illustrator file. Now I'm scrolling, move it across, grab the boning box point and holding Shift and left-click drag. I'm going to scale it down and I hold shift so it doesn't lose the proportion, so it doesn't go like all work and stretch as you can see, I hold Shift, select it, drag it. You can see here, it's not really looking effective because the image, there's always like whitespace here and I don't want that whitespace. What I want to do is scale this image out like this. And do it like that. So it's taking up more of the slide. You can scale it a bit down. Cool, and like has got the path there. You can see the image. I might have to edit it because it's not looking too good. So I can always go back into Photoshop, go to my vector mask and literally I can go through here and paint the stuff. I'm actually going to change this off the hardness to 100 percent because I don't want this faded, I want it more straight. I can also probably get rid of this and just make this mountain the main path because you can't really see the back there. Because you want a lot of contrast and you can see it's darker there. So I might leave it for like this. What I can actually do as well is I can add different adjustment layers before I resave it. So I can click this little button down the bottom here. Click on brightness and contrast. I'll bump up the contrast a bit and maybe even the brightness, and I can also color balance. So if I go back and click the menu, I can get a color balance. Maybe it's looking too yellow and maybe you want to make it more red or orange, like whatever you want to do. You can play around. Until you have something that's the way you want it. So you can see without the adjustments. If I add them, see it looks really cool. I can also add hue saturation. So if I want it more saturated, you can see if I want it more dull, I can make it a black and white if I want. So there's always little tricks that you can use to make it a lot nicer. So you can see the original and then I'll turn them on, they look really nice. So I've adjusted everything here that I might just edit this part as well. I'll do the same thing, I'll resave it. Save for web. Click save, and I'm going to save it on top of the same image and you'll get this box pop up that will say, "replace the file." What it means is going to save over the existing file we just made. So I'll click replace, and it's going to save that image. Then once I got back to Illustrator it will automatically change, and that's the key with Creative Cloud allows you to save over images and it interconnected with old programs, which I love. Once I go back into Illustrator, it should automatically have refreshed the file. So you can see it has actually updated it. It's got the contrast and it's got the edited bouncing as well there, which is super cool, and I can always go back and edit it. So you can see my photo. What I'm going to have to do is add a clipping mass. So I'm going to press M for the rectangle tool. You can also select it on the left hand side. I'm going to drag a box over my first slide. I'll make it orange just for now, and what I'm going to do, I want to make sure that it's in front of my photo. I'm going to make it a bit bigger so you guys can see what I'm doing. You want to make sure you select it and get a object arrange and you want to bring to the front, just so it's in front of this image here. So now what I'll do is I select the box hold Shift, select the image that I'm using, and then what I can do is press Control + 7 or command + 7. This will make a clipping mask. If you don't know the shortcuts, what you can do is go to object, and then you can go to clipping mask make. I can also release a clipping mask here. So you can see the two shortcuts, Control + 7, or Control + 7. If you're on a Mac, it'll be Command or option typically. So cool. So I had my image here and now what I can do is I'm going to bring it to the back, so I'll press Control + Shift and the left square bracket, right square bracket brings it up. Left square bracket up things down. So that's control shift and the square brackets. You can also go object, arrange and bring backward. So now I had my type here. I'll make it white and I'm going to bring this to the back. I'm making it a bit bigger. So it's almost filling the page like this. But I don't want to cover too much of the font here, or I could just call it journey. Am might get rid of that because it's not having the impact that I want. So I can go journey like this and I can leave it like this or I can actually press my Direct Selection Tool by pressing A, select this photo and bring it down a bit more, just so that text has more space to breath. So I can bring the clipping mask down as well or I can select the image inside the clipping mask, bring it down and lock it and bring this down like that. So that's looking pretty cool. Yeah, that looks great. So what I can do now is add a shadow because you can see here there's no shadow. So it doesn't look as realistic as I wanted to. So what I can actually do is I want to make sure that I go into my clipping mask here. I'll select my image. If there's no clipping mask, you can add a drop shadow to the image. You don't have to double-click or anything. So I'll select my image, I'll go to my appearance panel. Click the fx button. Go all the way up, click stylize and then click drop shadow. So I don't have to add a shadow in photoshop. I can do it in Illustrator. If you want to do shadows in photoshop, you totally can do that. I'm going to click preview so I see what's happening here. You can see there is a shadow there. I might have to bump up the blur. Yep. So I've bumped up the blur to 10 as you can see it there. The offset, I might have to increase it. The Y offset, I can make it get a minus, maybe minus two. The X offset I can give it zero. But it's like making a shadow upwards, and I'll drop the shadow to about maybe 50, 45 will go with 50 percent. The color can just be black. I can use the black from one of my swatches here. Press Okay. So it's not too harsh, and then I'll press Okay. Then now I have this drop shadow here and if I press escape I'll get out of the isolation mode, and you can see now if I go back, I can turn off and on this drop shadow. So get out of isolation mode, turn off and on, and it looks really cool. Looks like the text is hiding behind the mountains there, which is super cool. Then if I want to edit it, I can always go to my appearance panel, click the drop shadow button and always adjust it as I want it to be. Maybe drop the blur down, pull the percentage up. The Y offset, make it minus four. There you can go. If I want to make the shadow even more harsher. I'll drop my window back there, and then we have our first slide. It looks interesting and intriguing. It's a one word. So it's like, okay, was this about? I've centered the text. I'm not really using the guide which is totally fine because it's the first slide, and then now I can start to work on my other slides. 24. Creating the Carousel Slides: Once I'm happy, I'm going to start to go back and forth between notion and just copying my content that I've written now here and adding it into here. I can control C, come back to Illustrator and press the "Type tool" and then just "Copy" and "Paste" it in there. What I'm going to do, I can press the Eyedropper tool and select my font here, the images in the way. So I'm going to lock the image by pressing control two all command two if you're on a Mac, I'll select my type again. Press I for the eyedropper tool. It's also a located here on the left. I'm going to left-click on the font here, and it should copy it. So there you go. So it should make it the same color. Now what I'm about to do, it should make it the same size as well, but it's not doing that. So what I'm going do is, go to type, click Change case, and click Uppercase. So you don't have to retype everything out. You can just click down it's going to make it all uppercase. Then I'm going to press enter on the certain parts of the texts so if I press T, it's like I can press Enter and it's going to make a new line. I'll try and make the words fit nicely without having weird spacing. So I also turn on my guides here, So I can use my guides. So I'm using my arrow keys on my keyboard, now you can probably hear my keyboard tapping away. But I'm going to align it, it doesn't have to be perfect, but if I want it to be , I can line it up. There's a bit too much space here. So you can see here, if I just show, you can see there's a lot of space here and here is all right. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to fix the kerning. So I'm going to select the whole bunch of type. And I'm going to hold Alt or Option and tap the up key. You can see it's going to make the leading, it is called leading space between lines. It's going to make it a tighter. If you hold shift, if you hold, sorry, control or command at the same time and Alt, it does it faster. So I don't want to be too tight, I don't want it to be too loose. So I'll make it like medium. So that looks all right. I'll get rid of my guides so I can see and I'll zoom out holding Alt and might as well zoom in. I like that. So what I'll do now is I can actually highlight certain words, so I will need a different color or I can use my orange. I can also use a secondary color, which I use yellow. So what I do is I click my swatches, go to my colleague guide, and click the drop-down menu. Then I'll try and find complementary colors. So you can see here, I've got like greens. I've got these other green color. I also got a prentegram which is like all the five opposite of the colors and titrate, he's got that nice yellow. So I can play around with different options and see what we have. I can use like a lighter orange if I want, but typically I use a nice yellow. I'll just make that here because it's like a warm color. If I make a folder there. You can click the swatching, click the folder, I'll make a new one. So, because if I have too much orange like this, sometimes it can be overwhelming for the eye, it's like too much. So I can break it up by adding a different color. So I can add like a yellow or I can add one of those green colors that I was using. So, I can click this and I like this aqua blue, I can add that in. So now I have the secondary palate which are complementary and I can use that to my advantage. So you can see there, so it's looking on a cool. But for now, I'll probably just use an orange. So it breaks up the text. Instead of having a big slab of white text, it can be hard to read. So this makes it a bit easier. What I then can do is actually add an image here. Or I can just leave it. Or I can add like an arrow pointing to the next slide. I'm going to show you how to make things go across different slides. Once again, I can go to Photoshop, get another image and start to edit another the image. I've got this bridge pic. I probably won't edit that. I'll probably just use it as one whole image to emphasize my point. So what I can actually do is I can put it in the background. What I'd like to do is press M for the rectangle to drag a box. I'll bring my if your item disappear, you press Tab and it brings it up all your toolbars. Just in case you were wondering. But what I'd like to do, I make this box black. I'll turn the transparency in the blending Modes to multiply, bring it behind the text. I'm going to make it probably 70 percent, 80 percent. So you can see here, and obviously this image, it won't show on the outside. It's outside the apods, which is fine. So and I'll make sure it's like aligned. So I don't want it going outside onto the other slides because then it will look funny. So I zoom in and line it up. So I can use the image like that. That looks cool. Then for the other images, I'll probably use it separately. So for example, you see this guy holding the map. I'll drag and drop him into Photoshop. You don't want to drop it into the same file here. I go to the top toolbar and drop it there and it makes a whole new file like that. That's what I like to do. So obviously he's not in a jungle. So what I have to do is cut this guy out. So I'll go select subject. Then I'll make a mask, and then I'll fix his hair up and stuff, that. So I cut an image of this guy with the map. He's got a nice face, looking good there. I'm going to scale him down. What do you do to make images crossover from each other, all you have to do is just put the image over the two slides. So because all the apods are like right on top of each other. When you save that out and you put the images together, it'll automatically make it that when you swipe across, it'll be across both of them. So if you can't see the line, I can press control while it goes into Outline mode. And you can see how I got the apods and see all the squares. If my image is in-between any of them. So if it's in between these two, so you can see the image will be here. It will automatically go across the two apods and that's how you make images slide across each other. Obviously, you want to add a shadow to make it look more realistic, especially if it's like a person. So I add a shadow and I'm going to edit the settings here because it's a bit different to the mountain and the first slide, press okay. So now if I put it over the text, you can see it is like a shadow there. Makes it look really realistic. So then I can put him maybe like halfway with his body like this. or I can put him on the next slide of him looking at the map and I can make the map crossover a little bit, which looks cool. And then I can add some more tech. So what I'll do is put my guys back on and I'll duplicate the texts by holding out and shift. I can re-duplicate the text, so it's just consistent, I can play with it. Out-of-control Z, just in case it looks a bit confusing. So I'll keep working on the next slides. So I'm going through here. If I need to lock my images, I'll lock it by pressing control two or command two. So I'm going to put my texts like that if you can't read it because, the photo what you can do, you can just make it small and put it like this. Maybe I want to mix things up and I'll add some color so I can add a orange box. I can break the grid if I want. Like maybe I didn't like the grid then I can just break it like there's no rules. But if I would do want to be consistent, I can just keep it like that if I want but it's totally fine. But I'll, I'll keep the top bit the same. Sweet. So I'll highlight, because I've got orange back ,I'll make the texts black so I can select the text. You just press the T for the time tool and you can go select. This needs a hyphen. This doesn't happened overnight. That's looking really cool. And then maybe what I could do here's like add like an arrow. If I feel like my image doesn't work, I can always swap it with another one and move it around. Maybe I want to put it on the first line or whatever, it doesn't matter. So what I'm doing now is actually adding an arrow. There's two ways you can do arrows. So I'm going to show you the way we can do shapes, so what I've done is selected a rectangle by pressing M and dragging out a box. I like to make it the same color as I have here. It can be any color, I just keep in my brand colors whatever I want to show, doesn't matter what your color is. I drag a box, and then what I like to do is I'll go back to the star tool or the polygon tool. So if I go to the Polygon tool, I'll drag out a polygon, but I'll click and drag but I wouldn't let go of my mouse yet. So what I'll do, I'll press the down arrow key, it will decrease the sides. So if I press up, it will increase the slides, if I press down it'll decrease the slides and eventually be a triangle. So I can hold Shift and then I can rotate it by holding Shift. I don't need to hold Shift, but if you hold Shift, it keeps the angle at 45 degrees. Then I've got a triangle here. I will line it up with the middle of this par. You can see the guides, the purple guides are lining it up with the center, so I know this is centered. Then what I'll do, I'll scale this up like this. If I feel like it's too big, I can scale it down or make this little less thick, and then I have this nice arrow here. Then I can have a word here or I can make it go down like this so I can make another square. I like to duplicate things really easily. I can duplicate this and maybe I can make it behind the map, like whatever I want to do to make it look more interesting and creative. So I can do this and then maybe have an image or a word or something. So I can put like text here make it white. Then I can put some text here which is cool. There's so many different things you can do. So if I don't want it this way, I can make a arrow another way. So if I press p for the Pen tool and make a stroke, I'm holding Shift, left clicking once and twice, I'm going to bump up the stroke here on the top left corner you can see. Then what I can do, I select the stroke, click the stroke menu. If you go down about how far you'll see it says arrowheads. What I can do is actually click on one of the drop down menus and you get all these arrows which are default with the Illustrator. So what I can do is select any one of these, maybe I like the first one here, so I can click that, and it's going to an add an arrow automatically on that path. So if I move this anchor point of the path, the arrow head will move with it, which is really cool. If I want to decrease the size of this, I can go back to my Stroke panel and decrease the scale of the arrow and it will make the arrow a lot smaller. I'm holding Shift and left clicking just so it goes up and down by 10 percent. So that looks really cool. I can add an arrow on the other side as well, so you can play around with combinations and fun things but that's how you do an arrow head, or you can do it like this way. I just like doing this way, it's a lot easier. So cool. I'm going to start to play around, going to continue with this. So about the process, not the destination. So copy and paste it in here. Go to type, change a case, uppercase. Once again, I'm going to make it spaced out. If I feel like I have words that I don't need I can just cut them out, to be honest. I can move these, I go into outline mode just to help me out. I can make that a little bit smaller. So you can see I'm highlighting the word destination. So I can make it orange. You can see here all yellow, whatever color even, doesn't matter, it's about the presence of the destination. Cool, so that text fits really well. I can play around maybe these texts, it's just too highlighted, so what I can do is add like a dark gray, so I'll just change the color there. So then it fades in the background, so then we just see, when someone looks at it, they just see these words that are highlighted. Maybe the spacing is not dominative enough, so I'll make it even bigger and play around with that. It's all about the flow, what's working, what's not, and I'll go back to here. Now as you can see, it's a lot easier when you've written out all your content, and you've looked for the images. So then you design it all in one go because you don't want to try and do a back and forth. It just takes too long. So the more you do, the more quicker you'll be. So this one I can put another image, so I can maybe use the image of this one. I wouldn't cut it out there, I'll probably just leave it, put it in the back, and then I'll just duplicate this black box there in the back there. So I can always make a clipping mask if I don't like, because this guy's getting cut off, so what I can do, I can scale him up, do it like that. Maybe it's the guides or maybe drop it like this, and do like that. I break the guide for this one and I'll make a clipping mask. So I'll make a box, select these, Control 7, bring it to the back as you can see there. So it's a lot more of a nicer image because before he was cut off with the text, but I want them to see this guy in the back. It looks like he's exploring. You can't really see the waterfall anymore but if I click inside of the clipping mass, you can see I can move around the image again. So if I don't like it, I can press Control Z as well. You can see that, I can always edit. So now maybe I can adjust this a little bit. It's a little about playing around with the text and see what works well. I want to keep a bit of the waterfall, you see the waterfall looks really cool. I guess I'll keep it like that. Then once again, I'll highlight. I'm just going to continue here, continue to work through the Carousel. When I first started it, it took me about, let's say 3-4 hours, but now I can probably do it in an hour pretty relatively quickly if I find all the images have the content. If not, I'm not focused, then it will take me an hour and a half, two hours to finish. You can see in this slide here, there's a lot of text so sometimes I might try and simplify. So I'll just duplicate it there in case. It's like there's too much going on, so I can either break up the text and put it on two slides or just cut out some unnecessary text and just leave it on the slide. I can maybe make this it's own slide. So I can do it like this. I can scale it up and I can do a box on this slide here, make it orange. So I'm mixing it up. Then we'll have this. What I can do, I don't have to keep it like all aligned like this. I can actually center it all. This is like an important part of this slide. So if you have like an important quote or you have something that you really want to get across, like an ID or a word or something, then you can make it really big to emphasize that, and then obviously use the colors. You can see player on this side of the but, continues on to the next slide. So it crosses over so that people can read it. Then I'm starting to finalize here. Scale it down. Now, the easy way to use your Paragraph Tool is actually at the top. So you can see at the very top I've got the left justified, I've got center and right justified so this is a quick way. When you click on a text box, you can actually just click it up there, which makes it really easy to use. Then which image haven't I used? Probably we'll use one of these ones walking in the first as well. Maybe I can make this image go across two images like this, and I'll do the same thing. Drag a box. I'll use the Eyedrop Button, select this image here with the multiplier and the opacity, so multiply 70 percent. I can always drop the opacity as well if I need to. Plus I go walking to the forest, that's really cool. I'll just use this text here. Scale these up. Then for my second last slide, I always do like a summary. The way I laid out is sometimes I do a color books or just leave it, and you want to do like a checklist. You want to summarize all your whole ID or you want to give them a call to action. This slide always has to be a call to action. We can do points is you can do like a rectangle and then you can delete a slide and you can do triangles, for my point, so I can do a triangle. If hold Alt and shifts and then press control D to duplicate, I can have like points there. You can do circles, so if I press L for the ellipse tool, you can see I can make like a circle, like this. Three dots like that, I do stars. If you could do like a star, like a full one, so I press down and it becomes four like this. I can do it like that. It's whatever way you want to do it. I click this dots are now, and I'll just do like these little triangle things, and maybe have about four or five points you don't want to overload the user again and align the selection and if you press the send button, it aligns it all for you. I'll put it up just on the guide here. Then I'll start to put my points, so I've got my tips for enjoying the journey. I'll just copy this title and these points we have to make them small to make it fit. I'll change the case, make it white, so I fix it, scale this down. You can even do lines as well, so I can use the pen tool or just use the square tool. Can do lines like that. There's many ways you can do to highlight the points. You can see here, I'll just get rid of the hyphen. I'll bump up the letting there, so I'm pressing Alt and shifts to line it up. Then I'm pressing Control Shift and the full stop button, and the comma makes it smaller, but the full stop makes it bigger. Then if you hold control shift alt or command shift alt. Then it goes faster. You can see they should be white, and then this is a bit long, what I have to do is make these titles. I'm going to select these two lines, make sure are inside there, hold Control Alt and then bump that up or hold Alt and shift and just bump this one up, because it was moving everything else. If you get alt and shift, if you select the line, text on a line, you can hold alt and shift and you can change the lighting of just that line instead of two or three lines, and go do the same for this part here as well because it's one sentence, and if you hold Control Alt Shift, instead of just shift, then it goes faster as well. Another cool tip is always that you don't have to keep it all within one text box. You can see everything's in one texts box, I could separate everything. They'll probably be an easier way as well. I can also move these points. Have to adjust this as well now, and sometimes you can just count like a one two. If sometimes you don't know how in a consistent if you don't know how far you move that down. I'll put capitals, so that looks fine. You can see here, I've added the key points and then folded last slide what I'd like to do is add my brand photos. I'll go to one of the photos I have already edited, I'll drag and drop it into Illustrator, scale it down and put it here. Once again, I'm off to go summary slide. What you want to do on the last slide is have a call to action, so typically I'll add a box like this, and then I'll add like an arrow that goes down. What I'm doing, I'm indicating to go to the comments visually. I'm pointing down to the comments and then elected type out calling your thoughts, but it doesn't have to be this be like, was this helpful or like, what's your plan of action or stuff like that. Because you want engagements that you want to give a call to actions people can engage, and then I'll be like, I like asking a question. Like what will they do? Will you enjoy the journey? I'm just going to add a quick job shadow like I did before. Same thing, I want to make me too big , which is really cool. Then yeah. Usually you can put luck your tag, sometimes I may go @thejeremymura. You can put that on the last slide or the first slide. You could put on every slide, but to be honest, people are not going to pay attention to it and really look at it every time. Sometimes I'm I like having the corner, you can have your website all put like designer, like brand designer or whatever. Just line that up, a little tag there. Going back key, I'm trying to find interesting ways. How can I engage this contents? Maybe I can, maybe I want to add some more arrows or like I can add some texture to it if I want, or just like graphical elements. Just to fill in the white space or we can promote imagery, and I'll probably make these gray, so it's just like subtle in the background. It helps people like go with the flow, like make the eyes move across, pointing to the next point. Maybe you'll have a keyword on the next slide. Maybe I want to point out that, so there's many ways you can do it. Then I'll highlight, probably want this like that journey, cool. Awesome. Once we're done, I'm going to show you how to save it out now. 25. Creative Layouts with Basic Shapes: I'm going to show you a couple examples of how you can use shapes to have a creative and fun layout. Just by using some simple shapes, you can create something that looks a bit different than the average. You can see here, I have just a simple curve, so here's just six slides, which is just for an example, but you can see here, I've started to use triangles, I didn't add any color, but I'll show you what I did with the color. I literally have a triangle here, and you can add shapes by going to the left to go all these shape tool, you will see you so you can have a star, and if I click and drag, on your keyboard, you have your arrow case. If you press up, it increases the amount of sides, if you press down, it decreases the amount of sides, so then if you go all the way down, then you just have a triangle there. What you can actually do is you can actually scale it up by width, so if I select this side, you can see the little white square, I can hold there and press "Alt" option and just scale to make it thin. I can get this type of effect, then I can scale it up, if I want to make it bigger, I can do it on the corner and I can have that effect. It's cool to add shapes that go across two slides, it just makes it feel like it's smooth and allow space for the text. If I scroll through, so I had this one triangle here, and then I had another triangle which I customize, you can use the pen tool to really do this. So I just hide this for a second, I press "P" for the Pen tool, and then literally you can click like this, just full clicks to make that shape. You can see I've made that custom shape, which is really cool or I can bring this triangle here and manipulate it, and I can move the anchor points just by pressing A, so in the top left you can see the direct selection tool. That can help you control anchor points, which is the ends or the points of a path or a shape. As you can see here, so I can move these around. By doing that, I have created this dynamic shape P with the triangle, so it flows with the texts and this is still readable, it's not upside down or anything weird, because sometimes if I do it like this, it'll be hard to read it, and you want to keep it legible. Let's scroll through here, let's get it simple here and then playing around with the end slides here, so using some top of dot points or lists. I can see just to have your bonus tips or call to actions or whatever you want to add them, and then having call to action here. I like using photography so you can see I use my own brand image here, and then the call to action which leads down to the comments section here, which is really cool. I'm going to go down and show you what the color. I've added the color. Another cool thing as well is you can see I've had a logo, so you can always add a logo or your website or play around with the dates, and stuff like that. You can just add it to add a bit of flay into your Carousel. I'm scrolling through, so you can see the color comes to life, and it just looks way more interesting. I've got another example here. I've used this donut shape. You can see he just placing it over, shows a donut with two circles and a hole. If I show you how to make these, you just press L. On the left-hand side, you can see once again my shaped tools, and if I press L here, I can just hold Alt and Shift and left-click and drag out, so I have this shape here. Then all I have to do is press Control C, Control F to make another shape which goes on top of it. If I change the color and then grab the corner, so you see the white thing and scale these down, so you get a shape you like. Then I can select them together. I can press "Pathfinder too"l menu. If I've got a window, pathfinder, so you can see that. I can click minus front. If I just drag this out, make sure both things are selected, make sure this small circle is on top of the blue one, and I want to press this one, the second button on the shape mode, which is minus front, and it should delete the shapes selected. It pretty much cut out the top shape from the bottom shape, and now we have this donut shape here. I can change the color. I can do whatever I want with it. That's using the path line is one. I feel like it's really cool, and then I can go ahead and play around. You can see he's just done playing around. What if I cut the circle in half so you can easily just delete the endpoints here, so you can see if I select the "Direct Selection Tool" and press ''Delete''. I can see I get this shape, and that's how I did that, and then I just did the [inaudible] and flipped it using my selection tool. You drag the corners and you can just rotate it like this. You can see I've flipped it, was super cool. Then this effects, I've created a circle and you can actually use this tool called type on a path. You can see I've got type on a path here. This allows you to type on any line. If I create a line real quick and I go to the type tool, right-click, select "Type on a path". Click the path and you can see now it goes on that path. If I make a width squarely path like this, I can do the same like that. That's how easy it is to type on a path. Super cool and that's how I created this effect here, and then I place a circle in the middle of these two slides, so has a nice flow to it. You can see the eye will be reading. Your eye will come like this, go like this, and then flow like this naturally. There's a flow to it. Someone sees it, there'll be reading like this. It's unpractical and its objective, and then yeah, just playing around using these space that I've created for text, some points, and then the call to action, and then once again, using that shape again with a circle, just so I call that my [inaudible] and then a call to action, and then using arrows as well. These are just a couple examples of how you can just use basic shapes. You don't have to do anything crazy, but it really allows you to play around with some cool layouts as you can see and creates a nice effects. 26. [New] How to texture backgrounds: Another cool thing to do to make your carousels stand out is to add some texture. So I find my textures mainly on two sites. You can see Vexels are topped in paper texture. Vexels is a great platform you can find vector and PSD make-ups as well. Let's first stop and pick paper texture, you can see some interesting this pop up, for example, this leather one. If I click that, you can tell that it's an AI file, which is pretty cool but if I type in paper, we see what else comes up, "paper background." So you can look through this site and you can see some of these would be nice recycled paper. You can also go to free pick as well and type in "paper texture." They both have free versions but if you want to have a commercial license then you should upgrade because it's affordable. So you can see if I tap free pick paper texture it's got cool background and great quality. So plenty of cool stuff that you use so you guys can have that. I'm going to jump into Illustrator as I've got some text you see. So I've got a grunge wall texture pack so I can drag in textures like this. So this one is just a normal JPEG 300 DPI image. I'm going to scale it down to make a quick clipping mask. I'll put a square over there and then hold Shifts selected background texture and then I'm going to press my shortcut key, which is F3 and now I have a clipping mask there. So one of the cool things to make the texture blend, I could have just overlay text over the top, make it big like this and I'll make it bold. What I can do is to decrease the opacity. If I go to the top, you can see there's this bar. I can bring this bar down. If bring that, they're passing not too down maybe 90 percent, 80 percent, you can see that it starts to blend through a little bit. It lets the texture come through a bit. You could do it like that, or you could use transparency blending modes. Typically, as well I will just bring up the opacity, put text on top and I can start to play blending with modes. When it's a light color, you can do Color Dodge or overlay or screen. You can see overlay is the color on top but you're losing some of that contrasts because it's very saturated and bright. Soft light and hard light work well as well. You can play around the other ones that work too good. If it's a darker color, I can multiply it, color then, things like that. So if I go not completely black, maybe a darker orange, you can see with multiply off, this is what it looks like normally but if I got to darken or multiply. It's really looks good, it serve like burns it into the actual background there. It comes through the text, which is cool. I'm going to scroll through here using my mouse wheel scrolling down, you can see what the other ones look like. Overlay looks pretty good as well, but you lose some of that legibility. Soft light and hard light also work well. So that's a cool way if you're laying text on top. If it's a texture on a background you can do the same thing. So I can apply multiply but when you do this you want to drop the opacity. I have this texture, I put a multiply and put it to 50 percent. Because the background is very dark, it's pretty much hard to see so I'm going to move this texture to the other side, like this, so that we can see what's happening. So you can see already, it's looking nice in the background. Instead of a plain color, you're adding some texture. So if I bump the opacity to 100 percent, you can see it is very harsh, so I like to work around 50 percent and 40 percent typically works well. So anywhere between even 30 is good. 30-50 percent would be good as well. So I put 30. So you can still stay clearly on different screens. Sometimes the saturation is not as strong, so try not to go too low because if I go for like 10 percent, you might not notice it, on some screens. So for this example, I will do 50 percent and make a duplicate again and put it on the green and you can see what it looks like. So I can change, I can get color burn as well, lighten, screen works good as well, you can see it's sort of like a white Color Dodge. Overlay is not bad, Soft light is okay, hard light is also good as well as it keeps that detail which is nice. Then you've got other words like difference in exclusion which makes it trippy. Then same these other ones I wouldn't do. So that's just a quick example and you can see the purple version here, what it looks like. So it looks amazing and it just adds that extra layer of effect. So I'm also going to play around with the paper texture as well. What if you want to add a white paper? I can just add this on top and then I can play with the opacity again. So I can drop the opacity down like this and I can just make a mask. You didn't need to make to do a mask, but it just make more neat. I can drop that in the background and then add the text on top, textures, and two carousels and then I can go uppercase like that. You can see that's a cool way to add some texture in the background to make it look interesting like a plain color. So you can use paper grunge stuff, you can also use tiff textures. I've got a texture pack as well that I like using, that I've made myself for example, I can add these concrete texture. Let's say I move this and I make it yellow, I can drop these texture on top as this is just a bitmap. It's all like pixels. So you can see it's a bitmap which is super easy to scale up. It doesn't lose quality in Illustrator and also, I can change the color, so I can change to orange, blue, like whatever color I want. So if I want like a yellow, I can go to transparency click "Multiply" and adds a nice little texture in the background. So photo JPEG or an image is just a bitmap. I can play around, I can get a light color burn, screen makes it like light. I can drop the opacity down as well. So even just using something sarolight, this just works really nicely. That's how you blend nice textures in the background for your carousels. 27. [New] Graphic Styles In Illustrator: So a cool tip in the Illustrator that you can use to speed up your workflow and time in doing carousels is having graphic styles. I've got my Window open here and you can see the graphic style Window. You can go to Window and go down to graphic styles to open that up. You can see I've got all these styles already pre-made. What it allows me to do is to pretty much apply that style to any shape or object or texts. If I go and get a rectangle, I'm just going to go to my design layout and drag out a box. I'm just going to move to the right here. I've got this rectangle here, and all I have to do is literally just click once on these styles. You can see I've got different types of strokes here, different amounts of gradients. As you can see there, I've got a dashed line one, a full color gradient, different strokes here and it just saves me time. I've got this one. I've got one with a multiplier and 40 percent so if I put a color under this, it's going to multiply on top of it. You can save transparencies and blending modes in a graphic style as well, which is cool and opacities. Then I have got a gray one here as well. I'll show you an example of how I use these graphic styles. For example, for this Instagram growth strategies post I did this carousel. You can see I had all these different strokes. What I did was create one of them and then started to apply the other colors to the stroke. You can see these strokes, I can change it. You can see if I zoom in a bit, you'll see that to the pebble one, blue one so then I could go to these other ones and have that stroke. This is a gray stroke here and then this one is the yellow, orange one as you can see there. It just saves time and it makes it a lot easier. Here is a green one as well. You can see that. Then I can go ahead and change that. It just speeds up your workflow. You can also apply to text. If I just go to the right-hand side, I'm going to type in style here. I can also apply to text so you can see here I'm applying it to text as well. It's just easier instead of duplicating or doing design from scratch, you can just use these styles to speed up time. Whenever I make a new style, so maybe I'm going to make a new one so let's create maybe a colored with a dashed line, which is cool. Maybe I want to have a gradient on it. Maybe I want to have an appearance. What I can do is add the drop shadow. Just to make sure that I've selected it, I will go to the fx into a drop shadow. Now I can select this and make a graphic style out of it. Now when I make a box, I can click on that style that we just made and now it applies to that box. I can also do it on text and do the same thing as you can see there. Overall, it's a great way to save all the type of styles you want, especially if you do diagrams and/or lines. You can see I've used a dashed line there, or if you have consistent looking arrows, you can make that a graphic style. You can see the text here, I can make each one a graphic style as well. You can just add a cool effect. Once again, if you want to go and add more, you can go to the appearance panel and add effects. Just make sure you select the object. You can add warps and you can add drop shadows glows. You can add transform or roughen affects, zigzag, things like that. You can add any of these effects and then we'll add it, all you have to do is click Plus and we'll add it as a graphic style and it's going to speed up your workflow. 28. Critiquing Your Carousels: To critique carousels I've put some questions here. Now I'm not going to go through all of them crazy in detail, but a few really good ones is that, is this relevant to my audience? Think who your audience is, is designers or is it clients? Is it people you are just trying to reach in a community? Really ask yourself the question, who am I targeting? Also ask yourself, is the ID or thing in the carousels like my ID, the way you laid it out, is it telling the story simply? Am I getting the main point across, or is it too complex? Does the images enhance the message as well? You always got to check the imagery and really see, okay, does this image needs to be here? If it doesn't help the overall message with the text, then there's no point of having so many images because you just going to clog it up and it's going to look messy and not succinct. Other slides are visually interesting, so you got to always ask yourself, how can I make this slide better? Can I add some arrows? Can I add color? Can I add some bold image? Can I add a shadow here? Try and think, how can I show it visually? But also getting the key inside or point across to the audience. I'm going to show you some examples of cover designs I've done recently and I'm going to show you some positives on here. You can see my first slide, I focus on a bold font and you can really see if someone scrolls on Instagram they'll definitely see that the 25,000, you can see it's big, it's bold, it's awesome. It's really colorful. Then I have an image there, on a bus. The cool thing about using images, you don't have to necessarily just fill the whole image on the one slide, you can go across multiple slides because that will be like, it makes people want to see what's next. Like, "oh, this looks like it's going to continue." They'll scroll and they'll find out there's more there. On the second one you can see I'm using bold column and also a large negative space. It helps aid the ID of paradigm sheets because it's going for like the whole mindset thing there and I was really happy with this one. Obviously it looks a little bit blend. That's my critique. I just feel like I could have added some texture or added some shading or something there, just to emphasize more on the image. But I tried to use the image as creatively as I could, but I can always improve and adjust. The third on there you can see a clear good hierarchy. We got the texts, the least important text, it's all the same font, but I actually made it in a lesser weight,a smaller weight. Then a unicorn there and I highlighted that. Then you can see I've got a 3D image of a unicorn. The space is used well, it's not clogged, it's very simple. Then I've got my contact details in the bottom there, which is just my tag there. It doesn't have an email or anything, but it's just my Instagram tag so people can find me or if they want to shout me out, stuff like that, just makes it easier and it's a clean layout. That's some tips on just some of my covers. But it's always good to check your covers and critique it. When you're critiquing your slides, there's a few questions you want to ask yourself. You really got to see, if it's really readable and legible because a lot of people have different sized phones, especially in third world countries that own like older phones and stuff so the screen might not be big. They can't actually zoom in and read, like I'm on an iPhone seven at the moment, and I sometimes have to zoom in to read the texts. If it's too much text and it's small. I'm not going to read it, I'm just going to skip over it cause people's attention spans are really short and you don't want to strain them too much. You want to ask yourself, does the image at impact? An example of this is on the third slide you can see here how I've realized you're only competing against yourself, and all I did was put two brand photos here. It really communicates that message of competing against yourself because I'm boxing myself in that image, so it helps and aids and emphasizes on that point. Try and use imagery that adds impact and add some value, not just random images. Is a slide visually appealing? You can see all these slides, they're somewhat appealing. Some of them is just text heavy without any images like the middle one, but you can see it's very easy to read because I started highlighting words with different colors. If it was all white, it wouldn't look good. Then over here, as you can see on the left, you can see, I sort of did like adopt point list and using icons and in a color. Just laid it out with a nice text to make it really clean and readable. The last thing that you should think about as well is, is this consistent with my brand? I put a few examples here. I've got my page and I've got Dane Walkers page there. Definitely check it out and you can see the colors in the topography is consistent, the imagery is pretty similar as well. You want to make sure like does it fit well with my feed in overall, does it work with it? Or is my feed just all over the place, you've got to build a brand, not just the page. It's really important that you keep your identity consistent and if you not a designer then hire a designer to design some posts for you. Does it stand out? There are so many carousels out now, so you want to be able to differentiate and be different. 29. How to Save High-Res Carousels: What you want to do is go to file, you then want go to export and click "Export for Screens". Here's a cool feature from Adobe Illustrator, which allows you to save multiple artboards at one time and it makes it really fast. You can see here, what you can do, you can clear the selection. I can also click on all the slides I want. If you have multiple things in your file, you can select the ones you want, but I want to select all these artboards and you can see they're all in order. From this, what I want to do is on the right-hand side, you can see the range is 1-10. You can click all because this is all we have in the file, doesn't matter. We want to export it to, I'll probably create a thing in the desktop or actually I might have the file. So I'll save it in your folder that you want. I'll go to the journey, and I'll make a folder called "Output" and I'll select that folder. What you want to do, you're going to make the scale one and you want to put it on JPEG 100. You could probably do PNG as well, that's totally fine if you're using transparency, but we're not using transparency, because we've already edit the images in Photoshop , so JPEG would be fine. You can click on the settings here and see what JPEG 100 is. These are the settings that I use. I don't change anything, it's pretty much fine. Press "Save". Once you do that, you want to click "Export" and you can see it's done and it's uploaded all those slides. So you can see that if I press my keys, you'll see all the slides like that. I'll also save a PDF, and I can save that PDF for LinkedIn. I'll press "Control" or "S" or you go, "File" "Save As". Once you do that, you click down on the drop-down menu in the bottom. You want to select "Adobe PDF" as you can see here. Once again, what you want to do is you want to select "Use Artboards", and because there's only 1-10, I can select or doesn't matter, the range if you have multiple files and multiple artboards in here, but you can select all, which is fine. I'll select PDF and I'll find the folder again. Let me find it. The journey output. I'll make a folder called "PDF". Then I'll type "The journey PDF" and I'll press "Save". When it gets to this menu, you want to make sure that you're saving the file as a high resolution. I already have pre-saved templates here which you can use. You can also go to high-quality print, but I would edit it. But I'm just going to show you the settings I use. This is what I use. I optimize a for fast web, I want to view it after I save it. You want to tick off these other things like embed thumbnails, preserve capabilities, because it makes the file a lot bigger. You want to keep the file as small as possible so it's quick to upload and people can download it easily. That's fine, compression. What you want to do, you want to "Do not Downsample". You want to make the compression JPEG in maximum. If you put it on zip or no compression, the file size will be a lot bigger, but I found that using these settings, JPEG and maximum will make sure that the PDF is as high-quality as possible, but also being relatively small, because if there's no compression at all, then it's going to make it crazy big and you won't be able to upload it to certain platforms. But most platforms you can upload pretty heavy. The same thing for here, do not downsample. Monochrome just can be zip because that's just black and white. But once you get to the colorbitmap, then it should be this. Just copy these settings, "Marks and Bleeds", you can turn that off. I don't know why that's off. You can turn bleeds off, output. You can just leave it as it is. That's pretty much it. Then I'll say, "PDF" and there we go. If I look through my PDF now, it's all there. Flowing nice and great, awesome. The when you upload it to LinkedIn, then when they swipe through, it will overlap and everything, so it will be all sweep. I'm going to show you how to upload that now. 30. How to Upload Your Carousels to IG : What I'm going to show you now, is how to upload your files onto Instagram Credit Studio, and also Linkedin. With the PDF, what you want to do, you want to click on home on your LinkedIn profile. You want to go to the third button here which looks like a paper. You're going to click that then you want to choose file. I'm going to go to locate my folder which I have been using, the journey where is it here output PDF. I'll double-click the PDF, you can see it's 80 megabytes, and then I can name it the journey, and then all you have to do is press "Next", and it will automatically get published just like that. You can see it's loading. Then you can click next, and then we'll show you can add some hashtags, I've recommend adding between five and ten hashtags is enough, you don't need a spend on LinkedIn. Just use the right ones, and then what you can do, I go to my notion, I copy, and I paste directly into LinkedIn like this. Obviously, you have to clean up because notion has like HTML markup, and things like that, but that's cool. Now I can see this is how it looks. Preview it, I can see that it's overlapping. Looks cool, looks great, and if I need to edit it, I can click the edit button, and to change the document, I can go hashtag, journey, and then it gives you hashtags on bottoms, mindset focus whatever, and I can click it, and automatically add the hashtag and then you click "Post" and then automatically uploaded and that's how you do it. That's how you upload to LinkedIn. I'll just close this. I'll discard that for now and now we're going to go to Facebook Creator Studio, if you just type in Facebook Creator Studio, you can see that you can connect it to your Facebook, and it's free, and what you have to do, you have to connect your Instagram account to the Creator Studio, and once you've done that, then you can select it. You can see here I'm on Creator Studio, we've got all these options, but I don't want to update on Facebook. I'll have the option to upload on Instagram. If I click the icon at the top, you'll see now I mean Instagram, and what I can do is I can see my insights, and you can see how my account is connected there.I can see all peripheral visits, my total reachs 22,000, that's pretty cool, 44 K impressions. I can see my audience, heaps of information there. But I just want to focus on creating content. What do you click? You click the button called create post, and you want to click Instagram feed, and the cool thing about Creator Studio is that it allows you to schedule your posts, and your carousel, and set it all up without having to do anything. I usually use later, but I didn't use any third-party programs out because Instagram doesn't like it. They just like, they earn platform because Facebook owns Instagram. Just use this it's easy anyway, and once again, I can do the same thing, I can just copy everything in my notion board. If there are on or doc, just copy everything and paste it in, all your information. Obviously, I don't want to paste the IDs in that. I will delete those text-boxes, doesn't let me open it higher, then I'll click. Once you're done with all the adding the description, I click "Add Content" from file upload, and then go back to my images. I'll hold Shift, select all the images, and click open, and it should add all this images in. Once again, you can see it's a carousel post. I can see how it's going to overlap there, looking really sweet, and everything is looking great. I can also post it to Facebook if I click this little box it will post it for you if you have a Facebook account. I don't use Facebook too much for my business. I just prefer YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram, but once you're happy with that, you can click publish, but what you do, you click this little arrow in the bottom corner and click schedule, and then what you can do, you can schedule it. I can schedule it full today at like five, or seven whatever time. Tomorrow we can schedule it, and once you click that, it automatically posted on Instagram which makes it super useful. I can also click on advanced settings. If you want to turn off comments, or you want to search for a brand. If you're just doing it by yourself, you don't need to worry about those things, and once you're happy, you can just schedule, and then you're all sweet, and that's how you upload your carousel. 31. Video Templates for Non Designers: I want to show you a few options for those people who don't use premium pro and they want to speed up their workflow or just use some templates that can make it quick out then these two slides will really, really help you out. The first one is called in video, so you can go to the in video.io, and the second one is called crello which is really cool. Crello similar to Canvo, but they got really cool templates. Let's go to in video and you can see here just sign up. They've got a free version and you can also upgrade for a better templates and content and stuff like that. But you can literally search through categories. They got brand essentials, trending advertisements. They also got blank templates, pre-made templates, article to VO templates, which is really cool. But we can really create an Instagram story or an Instagram post that can be nice and present our carousels well. I feel like this is a really handy tool. I'm just scrolling down here and you can see all the different type of stuff. But what we want to do, we want to use Instagram stories. I want to click on this one. See in the center here you'll see you can type in something, but you can also go to pre-made thing here which is Instagram story. I can see what's hot. You can see, you got some cool templates that we can use, which is really, really cool. Editor's pick. You got some of these corns. I think I'm just going to go with a really, really simple one. Let's just stick with this one.Here established glasses. I'm going to click that. You can see it's got some sound, which is not good, but you can see that it's cool second animation and I can select wide vertical square. I'm going to select vertical because we want the stories and I'm going to click Use this template. Once this loaded that template we'll go to the editor. What we can actually do, we can actually remove the watermark. We can add music text, stickers, affects, shapes, enhancements. We can even upload images and things. It's really, really handy and cool. What if I wanted to maybe edit the picture here? What you have to do is click the picture. We can move it around. I can play around, double click on the text and edit these texts. New update. You can say carousel or whatever. How to design a carousel or something. Just imagine this is our design. We can delete stuff, so I'm going to select this and press Delete. It, should delete it. I can get rid of this button. I can move stuff around. There is so many things you can really, really do. You can also click on the text and you can click on the style and change the font. Maybe we want to do a different font or if you do like Oswald or something. Obviously it is a little bit slow, but you have to be patient with these type of tools. That's really cool. We can change the color, what if we want like black or something. Can change it to black. That's the box color, text color will go blacks if this works. Cool, it's working awesome. We can play through the animation. I click Play, you can see what it looks like and it's looking really, really neat. Best thing to do is play around with this, see what you can do. You can actually trim the animation, depends how long you want it. You can make it less shorter. We can add some music. It's actually got music included. We can select that and add that into the actual video template. We can select it, should add it. I can add some text we can drag, we can select headings, and it will add a text box. As you can see here. I can say @thejeremymuro. Obviously I don't typically use these tools because I use Adobe software and things like that and it's just a lot faster for me to use what you are comfortable with. Just showing you what's available and what you can do. I can add a sticker. What if I wanted to swipe up? I can click on the CTA and I can maybe use this thing. Swipe up. Let's see what looks like. All comes with animation. It's really cool. If you just played around with this, then what you can do, you can click Preview and Export and you can see that it's playing the animation. They all really cool and we can all change the logo and change the colors and stuff. But I'm just showing you a quick overview and then we can export it as a watermark, and I always export it pretty much as a mp4, which you can upload it to Instagram, which is really, really easy. As you can see it's processing here. You can reign in the project, delete the project, and it's really, really cool. Obviously I'm seeing delete the project, but that's how you use invideo and it's really cool, really easy for those people who don't have a designer or design skill. We're going to jump to Crello now. It's pretty much similar as well. We can click on video here. We'll take it down to some templates. I want the format of an Instagram video story. I'll click on this format, and you can see that we have a blank canvas here. I can then go click on one of these cool little things. I'll click on one of the of the designs, already pre-made designs. Then I can click on Photos, I can add photos, certain videos, animations, and obviously the premium version will give you more. If I click Play, you can see all this stuff. It's really, really, just a really interesting template and we can double click on things and click on it. If I want to edit the type, I can select it. I can change the font if I want. Maybe I want racing sense. Once again, you got to keep in mind that these programs require fast internet to load everything. There we go. We can see that it's changed. What if I wanted to make it bigger? You can see you can make it bigger, that's pretty cool. Make the button a little bigger, that's so awesome. I could move this character out. What if I wanted to maybe add something else? I could add like this little guy, just click on it. It's premium so we can't use it. What about backgrounds? You can see some of these stuff costs spot. Let's play around. Can edit some of this stuff, can make a bold. You limited to some of these options. But play around, see what you can do. But really it's all about seeing the templates, and you've got some options up here. You can flip, you can edit the transparency with these options. We can play the animation, see what it's looking like. We can add pages as well as you can add new pages and then we can download it. It's going to download this animation, which is really cool. This is another tool you can use to create your Instagram stories Instagram posts really, really easily with a hundred of thousands of designs. But obviously it's not going to be too custom, you will be limited. You can upgrade to the premium versions, but this is another cool tool to use. 32. Creating Black White Images: I want to show you how to make a black and white image in Photoshop. Once you drag in your image into Photoshop, it could be a background, or portrait, or whatever it is, just drag and drop it into Photoshop and it should make a layer. We're going to the bottom right and you'll see this little button. You can see it's like ellipse or half circle. You want to click that and you want to select this layer called black and white. This is an adjustment layout, and you can see it's on now and it's actually turned the whole image black and white. I can turn that on and off like this. But it's really easy way to quickly add a black filter on top. One of the things I do to edit some of the shadows and the lighting is, you can see it gives you all these default filters so if I go to properties and I select my layer here on the back and white and click not the mass, but you want to select the left side of it, you'll get these options seen. I can change the preset. If I just scroll through, you can see my face will start going darker and it will look weird a couple of times, smooth it out. It actually comes with all these filters. You can add this filters by yourself or I'll click on "Default". What I can do is I can actually move these sliders. Typically, your skin has a yellowy red tone majority of the time. You can see that that looks really weird. You can move that. If you have more sunlight, maybe you went in the daytime and it's yellow, you can brighten it or darken it. Then you can play around with the other ones. But typically, like blues and greens, you're not going to have that in the photo unless it's colored. Because if I turn this off, if I zoom in on my skin, you can see there's red tones, there's yellowy brown bits. It's not blue. That's why when you play with the red and the yellow with tints, you can see it makes a difference to your skin. That's a cool tip when you're playing around with skin. Another thing I'm going to add is a brightness and contrast layouts. I'm going to close that and I'm going to go to the bottom, back to the same menu. I'm going to go up to brightness and contrast. Then what I typically do, because I like high contrast, I'm just going to double-click on this little icon. You can see my layer's panel. I'm going to double-click the sun icon and I'll get two options to move the brightness and contrast. I can bring it down if I want, or I can bring it up. Typically, I'll broaden up my image and I'll bump the contrast up as well. You don't want to go too dark because you can see it start to lose detail like shirts, and materials, and even my face. I can't even see that right side of the eye so you don't want to do it too much. If you do it too low, you can see, if you want a software image, you can make the contrast very low. I, typically, go halfway up on the brightness and the contrast. If I turn that off, you can see the difference. It really broaden up the image and made it really pop. If I turn everything off, you can see this is how the image starts. Then now if I turn on the black and white and the brightness and contrast, you can see what happens now. Then I can go to the image and then I can do the usual and cut it out. Then I have a black and white portrait shot like this, I'll press "C" and then I'll hold on to crop it like this and then I'll hold this side, press "Enter" and I'll just crop it, and now I've got image. and I can export as a PNG, really easy. The cool thing about these effects is that it's non-destructible. I can turn these layers off, I can delete these layers and it's not actually affecting the RASA pixels of my photograph portrait by itself. That's a quick way on how to make your images black and white. 33. Create a Cool Profile Picture in Photoshop: I'm going to quickly show you how to create your own custom profile picture that looks really cool, that stands out and it pops a bit more. You can see in my picture over here, I've got a white strike of black and white and you can see my brand color in the back. It just makes it more vibrant, it makes it more branded so people can tell that it's your page and I feel like it's a little stronger. You can see here just in Photoshop, you can see all these layers of edit on the right-hand side. You can see the original one was just this, then added a bit of a black and white filter, some brightness and contrast, then added a stroke just to make me pop more. I'm going to show you how to create this effect. We want to go to File and New and we want to create a size of 1080 by 1080, the minimum size you want to have is 180 by 180. But obviously I want to work in a higher resolution so Instagram will automatically downsize it anyway and compress it so that'll be fine. I'm just going to name it profile pic 2020. It's going to be on pixel's RGB color and the resolution 150, that's totally fine and I'll click Create. Once I've got my Canvas C, I'm just going to drag one of my images that I have so you want a nice head shot of you smiling or laughing or something like that. I'm just going to hold Shift and drag this up. When it comes to like a nice photo, you want to make sure that it looks happy and positive, but also you want it to be more zoomed in. You don't want it to be like heaps far out. Because on Instagram it's very small and on phones it's a small screen, you want to make it more zoomed in so you can see a face and it looks a lot better. You don't want to squish, cut off your head at all. You want to make sure your head is in the middle and I'm just going to zoom in a bit more and you want to make sure that it's all seen it as well. It looks good. I'm happy to get that as totally good. What I'm going do now is I'm going to go to the Select the top menu on the left, click subject to cut myself out and I don't press Alt Control A or Command Option A, if you're on a Mac. I'm going to zoom in here. Just press control plus the zooming hold space bar, what I'm going to do, I'm going to select my selection tool on the left, the second one which is refined the edge, I just want to fix my hair up. I'm also going to click decontaminate collars on the right-hand side. I'll turn Show Original off. Now I'm going to start to paint my hair of it, as you can see and it should automatically fix that. My brush size is very small. It's the same as cutting out images, fall out, slide images. Cool. It looks good. Press "Okay." Then now I got a new layout with my cut out. I'm just going to turn off this background layer and delete it. Now I've got my head here this is looking good. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go down the bottom and click on the drop down menu with the little circle with the black and white fill. I'm going to press solid color. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to paste my orange color. If I just go to my orange color from here, copy and paste into here, press "Okay." Now I've got this layout, which is just a colorful layer and I'm going to drag it to the bottom layer. Now it's behind my face, which is really cool. What I'm going to do, I'm just going to delete my old layer. You can see here without the mask because I just don't need it. But obviously, if you want to edit or go back a step, I recommend keeping that layer above, but this is true, it's fine. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to go back to that same drop down menu with all the options and I'm going to go to black and white. This will add a black and white filter over pretty much this layer. But what I want to do, I don't want to add the black and white to the orange background. You can see how it's adding everything. What I do is go to the in-between this filter and my image and hold alt option and left-click, you'll see this little option comes up on my mouse. What I'm going to do is just left click once. Now I just adds the black and white to my face, as you can see that. That's a cool tip. Just hold out option and you click in-between the layout, which means it's going to nest the above layer only on the bottom layer. On this bottom layer we have here. You can see a little arrow pops up. Now the black and white is only applying to my face. What I'm going to do now is I'm also going to add the brightness and contrast filter. It's going to bring that up. What I want to do and you can see on my properties here, should pop up the brightness and contrast. I'm going to pump it up. I don't want to overdo it because then you can't see the details on my face and it looks unrealistic and I don't want to document face too much. You want to be somewhere in between someone who brighten it up a little bit. Maybe go like 55. That's looking good in the contrast. I can decrease it or increase it depends on your style of how you want to look. I can decrease it if I want, but I like to have a bit of contrast, so I'd maybe 20. Now if I turn off that you can see the difference it makes. I can see myself a lot better, a lot cleaner and the black and white there. The reason why I do black why it is because you can see with a strong brand color, which is orange for me, if my skin color and skin tones don't work well. It's very muddy and how to seem a face that's what I get for black and white. It's also a visual stylistic approach as well, just for my personal brand. Once you're happy with the image, I'm going to show you how to add a white stroke to make your image puppet a bit more. Locate your layers on the right-hand side, double-click on the layer. Then what you want to do is go to stroke, click that on and you can see it's a little bit thick, so I'm just going to click on the gray area here so I can turn things. I can select this layer. I'm going to make the size you're on too big it, it looks bad. Too thick just pretty much muddies at your face and you don't want that to be. You want to be just a little bit so I'm on 18 pixels, that looks fine. I want to make sure the positions on the outside and the blend modes are set to normal capacity 100 percent and the color is white. You can obviously change the color to other ones. Like maybe if I wanted it yellow or something, that might look all right. But how [inaudible] press Okay. Then we have the IDP is looking good and then I'm going to export it out now. I'll go file on the top left corner, click File, go down to Export, click Save for web. Once you click on that, what we want to do is make sure that the image is set to JPEG. We're just going to zoom out here so you guys can see the image. That's the final image that's how it's going to look like. I'll click on the preset section up here, the drop down menu, click JPEG. I want the JPEG to be on maximum, so certain Max and the quality will be 100. That's good. You can leave this on an optimized, that's fine. You can see the sizing is 1080 by 1080, so it should be fine. Instagram should compress it. I'm going to click Save. I'll save it to my desktop. Display pick 20-20. Then if I go to Instagram now and upload it and just go to your profile. Click Edit Profile, then click Change Profile Photo, then click Upload and just locate your file and Double-click on it and it should work and upload that in JPEG. That's how you pretty much create a cool display picture for your Instagram. 34. Animating Text on a Carousel Slide: What I'm going to show you now is how to do some basic animation in-after effects. We're not going to go too crazy here, but I'll show you how to edit some text. I'm just going to show you a quick example of what I've done here. This is one example of what I did for one of my carousels. I did on the last slide, and you can see that all these presets. I typically use plug-ins as well to help me out, but I'm going to show you how to do it without any plug-ins. What I'm going to do is I'm going to close this project real quick. I'm not going to save that. What I'm going to do is click New Composition. You can also go to the top here comp, new composition, which is Control N. Then you'll get this box pop up. You can rename the box of the comp, so I'm going to call it Instagram, Carousel, Slide. We're going to make the pixels 1080 by 1080 because that's the size of our Instagram square. You can leave the frame rate on 30, which is fine. You want to change the duration as well. Sometimes it might pop up like 20 or 30 or something. Change it to five seconds. You can see five, and then there's two zeros that means it will be five seconds. Then the resolution can be full or half. That's up to you on how fast your computer is. But everything else is fine. You can leave all these settings as well. Then once you have it that press Okay. You can see that the background is black. You can actually change the background by pressing Control K. When you have pressed Control K or Command K, if you're on a Mac, you can actually go back and change the background color here. I left it on black because I like black, but you can change the color and you can see it's actually changing now as I'm moving the color. Whatever your brand color is you can put the hex code from Illustrator or Photo-shop into this box and change the color the way you want it. I'm going to leave it on black because typically that's the color of my carousels. First up, I'm just going to go to my Illustrator file. You can see here I have some text here. I want to pretty much mimic how this design looks here. You can design it in Illustrator, the layer, and then we're going to go after effects and sort of mimic this. I'm going to get these text, "will you enjoy the journey." I'm going to go to after effects now and you can go to the top left to create a type layer or use the type tool. It is at the top left and the shortcut is Control or Command T. Once you do that, I'm going to left click once on the actual comp or the art-board as it's similar to Illustrator, but they call it compositions, which is pretty much an art-board or your workspace. Once you left-click, you should get a layer pop up in the bottom left. You can see about these layer and it has empty text. I'm just going to make sure I click here and type. Will you enjoy the, I press Enter and the journey question mark. Obviously it's too big. What I can actually do is I can actually go to my paragraph styles. You can also open your windows. If you get a window, you can always locate this specific window you want by looking in here. You can see paragraph, let me just adjusted it here, which I have over here. What I can do is I go to the two Ts, which is the font size and I can actually drag it down. Make sure you select the text first by double-clicking or pressing Control or Command A to select everything. Then if I scale this down, you can see it should start to scale down the size there. I'm on 115 pixels. I can go to my selection tool by pressing V or selecting on the top left corner. Make sure your caps lock is not on because then some things would go invisible. Keep that in mind. I'm actually going to go to my paragraph again, which is here. I'm going to make sure that the text is aligned left. I'm going to drag these into the middle. I can also scale it down. Hold shift when you click the bounding box and just scale it. Which is cool. I can double-click inside this text box and I can highlight the journey like this, and I can actually color it. I can double-click on the color here. Should be able to change to yellow, press Okay. You just double click on this watch, works the same as in Illustrator as well. It's just as nice watch panel you just have to select it using the character tool. I'm happy this is looking good. I can always adjust the size of one. I can also adjust things like the tracking as well if I want to have custom tracking and the tracking on the bottom here is like this. You have total control over that in the character and the paragraph windows. Just remember that. I'm going to zoom in here. What I'm going to do now, to make all these texts come in from the left, what I'm going to do is go to my bottom timeline. Just zoom out a bit. Let's go. Sometimes you can customize the extra percent but it's not doing it anyway. On my text panel you can see I have layers. What we can do is click this little arrow, which is going to put some drop down menus. You got text and you got transform. We can leave the texts little menu there. We just want the transform menu. What I can actually do now is select the text. What I'm going to do is click on position. But you want to click this little timer on the left-hand side. Once you click that, it's going to start an animation on the timeline, and it's going to add animation point. As you can see here. I've got this little diamond thing. That means the animation will start from this point. What I'm going to do first, I want my text to start off the actual composition. I'm going to hold Shift and left-click and drag it all the way to the left where you can see how it's outside the actual composition. I want to make sure I select my Text Layout. I'm going to do is drag my play head all the way to about maybe one second. I'm going to hold Shift and drag my text back in like this. Now what you can see is, I'm just going to hold hold Space and click to move. You can see that this is the first point and as I've dragged it and created another point on the timeline, it's showing that it's going to move from this to this. If I grab my play head and bring it back, you can see what's going to happen. The text is going to come in from the left. Remember you need two points at least for the position. What's the starting position? Then what's the ending position? You can do the same thing for the other things like capacity in scale. If I want to make it fade in a bit more, I'll click the timer on the opacity. It starts off at 100 percent, but I want to change it to 0 percent. I'll drag my play head to the one second mark where the other point is, and then I'll go click on opacity and click 100 percent. What it's gonna do is it's going to start at 0 percent opacity, come in and go to a 100. You can see it's fading now, if you look at the text. Acts like a fade effect. Then the position starts off the page at minus 900 and then comes back to this position here. You can also add rotation. You can do the same thing for scale. If you want to add scale, for example, I can show you maybe it starts really small or it goes bigger or goes smaller or bigger. You can see if I press Space-bar, comes in like that. But I don't want that. If you want to get rid of these points, you can actually delete them by clicking Delete. Or you can just turn off the timer tool by clicking it like that. If something, you press a button and the menu goes away, if you want to see all your animation points, you can press the shortcut key U. If you press U, it will show you all the animation parts. If I press U once it'll show me my position and opacity that I've added the animation on the timeline. I can press U again, it will get rid of it and that's a quick way of showing it. You can also press S for scale, P for position and there's other buttons as well for the other ones. Those are the main ones and there's other shortcuts for rotation and stuff like that. R is rotation, and then opacity is something else, which I'm trying to remember. That's how we do that effect. You can see that it's not as smooth as you want it to be, so how do we make it smoother? What we can actually do, is I can select all the points here, by left clicking dragging in the timeline. I can right-click and go to key frame assistant. What I can do is actually add easy ease. I can add easy ease in, I can also add easy ease out. What I'm going to do, is just to easy ease for now. Now if I play, you should see it should be a little bit smoother. It comes in a little nicer and not stiff as much. I'll show you the difference, if I click on this icon here on the left, it's like a box with a line, it's called the graph editor. You can see how the animation is happening. It has a nice curve, so it starts slow then it builds up and then slows down back at the end. If I go back and if I turn off easy ease, so if I press control z and click the graph editor, you can see it's just a straight line now. It's very stiff, but once again, if I go back and select these and right-click and go easy ease, you can see the graph editor it's smoother. I typically do easy ease in or easy ease. Now you can see, it's a lot more better than how it was before. You can also do easy ease out as well. Just depends on what to do. That's how you could do a quick animation of texts. You can do the same thing for an image by using position, opacity scale and all the same thing. Now I'll show you how to export that as well. Once you do this, you can go file and what you want to do, you want to go to export and you want go to add me. If you don't have immediate in cutter, you can add to Render Q. If you want transparency and you don't want the backgrounds, what you do is you click on this little button here, which will toggle the transparency grid. This will help you make sure you can see that it's going to be transparent. If not, then it's totally cool. Once you press export, you'll get this Render Q menu, which you can drag around here, so you can see this is my composition and then this is the Render Q. I'm going to click on Render Settings on the text, the blue text, and you'll get this box pop up. You can see, you want to make sure that the quality is on best because you don't want it to be low resolution. Everything else you can leave the same. I want to click on output module. This is where we want to make sure that the settings are right. Typically I'll bring it into media and code out to save it out as MP4 because in here it doesn't really have that option so It would be AVI. What you want to do, you want to make the channels RGB and alpha. I'm going to show you one more cool trick to add a little comment your thoughts section in the bottom. I want to show you one more little trick that you can do to add text, make a cool little fun effect. I'm going to do for the bottom tag where I will say like comment on your thoughts. Sometimes people say like, was this helpful? Or share it or whatever, you can have a code action or maybe just your tag or whatever, it can be anything. I'm going to use the tag tool again, drop some type in here and I'm going to type comment your thoughts. Obviously I usually have icons and arrows and things, but I'm not going to go too crazy with that. I want to go to my character on the right, I just drop down the bonus a bit. I think it was on extra bold, I can do semi bold, that's totally cool. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to make a new solid layer. So if I go to the left-hand side, right-click in this gray area, you can click on new and you've got all these options. You can add shape layers, solid layers, whatever. For this effect you can use a solid layer or a shape layer, it doesn't really matter. But I'm just going to do a shape layer. I'm going to click on solid layer. You can type square or box or whatever you want to call it. I can pick a bright color so I can see in my layers because you can see in the timeline I only got two reds there, I can maybe go yellow or something, press Okay. The width, I'm going to drop this down to actually I'll do 600 and the height 200 because I want a small square. I don't want a big, big square. You can see my square is on the top layer here now. I'm going to drag this and I'm going to roughly make it a box that covers all my text, as you can see here, the length of my text, which is cool. You can see now we have this yellow square and it's over my text. What I want to do, I can change the color of my layer so you can see if you click this little red square as well, I can change it to yellow. When I select it, you can see that when the text is red, it's behind it. What I'm going to do is go to my text layer, which is under it. What you need to do, this is important, you need to go to track matte. Make sure that option is there. If it's not there, you got to right-click on this little column things and click on columns and then you can add it in. If it doesn't show up, you got to make sure that you have modes there and you got label and all these stuff. All we have to do is right-click anywhere on these little column section where it has all these icons in mode and track matte. We want to change it to alpha matte. You've got to make sure that this square layer is on top of your text layer. Once you've done that, what I'm going to do now is, I'm going to get my text and make sure this layer is selected, I'm going to press p for the position and I'm going to drop the position below. You can see this square layer is acting as our mask now. So it's like a solid layer or a shape layer which acts as our mask. What I'm going to do, make sure the text is there, I'm going to click the timer, set a point on the timeline. But I'm going to make sure that my play head is at the start. You can see that I should have brought it to the start. It's going to start off below this box and then as I get to the one second mark, I'm going to go to my position and go to the second part of it and bring it up. Now you can see it's going to come up and obviously it's going to be within that box. You don't want to go too far, but you just want to go to where you can see the text. Now you can see if I play it, it's coming up and popping up. What I'm going to do, I'm actually going to shorten the distance between these two points to make it more faster. I'm going to select these points, right-click and click on easy ease in. Obviously the short cut keys are here. If you're on a cable that has these nine keys, you can do that. Now I'll play it again and it's a lot more punchier, a lot more nicer, a lot more cleaner. What you can actually do as well, is I can make another point, so if I duplicate this point, by selecting this little point here, control c and control v, it shouldn't post another point here. What I want to do, I want to make sure that my play head is exactly aligned to this point and I can drop the position to bring it back down, back down like this. Now, when I play, it is going to come up and then it's going to go back down. If I play, it can see that it's a bit first so I bringing this. I'll also right-click these point and change it to Easy Ease Out. When it's leaving out of the animation because it's the last point, it's going to make it a bit more smoother and bit more slower. As you can see, it's like how's that fade effect comes up, bounces back down, and if you want it to make it a little bit longer, what you can do is I can duplicate this point, this second where it lands at the top and I can sustain it so I can make it. These two points is pretty much staying in that position, and then the last point is the imposition. I can just copy this one and paste it right next to it, now if I play it, it should last longer and then bounces back down. As you can see there, I can also probably do Easy Ease Out on this one too, you can see the icon actually changes as well. Up comes down. Love it, looks really cool. If you wanted to add another text there, there was a cool effect on Instagram, some guy had like three ones popping up, what you can do, I can select these two laser holding, can Shift, press "Control D" or "Command D," and it shall duplicate there's two layers. I'm going to change the colors so we can see what's happening. The square, I can make this one peach color. Make sure that the everything on, Now, what I need to do is I can change this text. I'm going to press "P." Make sure the right latest before we do this and I can type in "Was this helpful question?" Obviously the layers on top of each other, and what we need to do now is I'm going to hold Shift, grab these two layers in the timeline, you can see I've colored it, so make it easy. I'm going to Left-click and drag these two bars. So you can see these two bars am going to drag these bars, and I'm going to bring it to the ends of when the, "Comment your thoughts" goes down. You can see, for being the play head, you can see your thoughts go down, and as soon as it hits the line, I'm going to drag the bar there, but obviously, let's see when this one starts. When the other one ends, you want this one to come up so you can see it starts around here so I'm going to bring these points back to these points like this, so I bring it bit more left. You can also add marker as well, I'm pretty sure, but that's for now. I'm just going to do it this way, you can see I've dragged and now in this falls I'm just dragging my play head. This one comes up, boom, boom, nice transition. If I play it all together, to easy. The cool thing is because I've copied these layers, you already had the animation already on it, I didn't have to add them again. So you can just do it once and then duplicate it, and then he can say this as a template if you want to just putting other takes. So every time you do a carousel or post, it will be the same. That's how you do it, if we zoom out and look at it together, you can see that's super cool. You can do the same thing for icons the arrow whatever. What I'm going to do now is save it out and export it. Once you are happy with it I'm going to show you how to export it now, and obviously you don't want the timeline to be heaps long, you can see it's still in five seconds, which is fine. But if you created a long one, make sure that it doesn't go too long because then you going to have to render all these pointless time, but what we're going to do, we're going to file click on export, and you want to click "Add to Render Queue." Once you click on that, since you like this, we want to lead the Renne's settings at best settings if you click on that and make sure it's set to best and resolutions on full, so then it will use the size we set it, that's okay. We want to pay attention to the output module, so I want to click this lossless text here in the bottom left, you can see you want to click that the formats we have a doesn't have H.264, which is the one for YouTube and stuff, which is an MPEG. You can see it's got like AVI, it also has QuickTime as well, if you're on a Mac, you could probably use QuickTime, but for me it's only AVI. The issue with AVI is that the files is so big and it's just going to take up space I may not need it, typically I would send it to render queue and then change the format to H.264, which is an MP4, which I can put on YouTube or all platforms and the compression is better and the size is smaller. I'm going to show you how to do this example though. What you want to click on channels, you want to click "RGB" plus "Alpha," because we added those alpha channels for this text at the bottom, we want to make sure that it's going to come through in the mask that we set on that shape. You want to click RGB plus Alpha and everything else. You can leave the same and press "Okay." What we want to do we want to locate wherever you want to save it, I'm going to save it to the desktop, and press "Render" should take any little bit because it is only five seconds, really easily done. I'll go to my desktop and I'll double-click this, and you can see there is our animation. Looks really good, super cool. That's you animate it and export it out, really easy to do, and then all you have to do is when you upload it in create a studio, it's the same process as updating your images, you just update the video. Once again, you can see the AVI file is 600,000 megabytes, which is not that good, I'll quickly show you how to do it this way as well. What I can do, I can grab the file, drag it, and drop it in here in the media encoder, and you can see the setting, this is the settings I would use. I'll select the format and make sure it's H.264, and then what you can save it as you can target the bit, right that's fine. He could do 12 and 12 VBR is fine. You can click "Maximum Render Quality" and everything else, you could probably the same and press "Okay," and then that's how you can render it out and save it to Output and press the "Play button" and it should save it. Maybe I should just save it so you guys can see. I'll just quickly render it. You can see now the file is any one megawatt, and it's the same thing, same quality, you can see that. That's just another way of doing it, say to have that space. Yeah, that's a animate the text for your Carousels. 35. Next Steps: As we'll say, thank you so much for taking the course, and I hope that you've learned all these cool Instagram tips and tricks, as well as how to create awesome carousels that are going to ultimately grow your Instagram following and increase your level. So I really appreciate it. If one thing though I ask that you guys can do is take action on your class project that will help solidify your knowledge and what you've learned today. So even if it's just five slides, just do your best, don't take it too seriously, but once you learn to create them, then you can create more and you get better and better up. One last thing as well, if you could go down to the review tab, you can see reviews, about section, click on reviews and you had this leave view button. Once you've watched everything, you can click leave a view and give some honest feedback. There'll be some buttons where you can set, show like, did it meet your expectations. It was a actionable steps with the other things that need improvement, give some honest feedback. It really helps me out and helps my scotia classes grow as well. So I really appreciate. Have an awesome week and I'll see you in the next class.