Welcome to day 7 of the massive Bookending Spring event! The prompt for the day is ahow to make graphics for our blogs. Remember to check out Sam's I Give a Sheet post. The prompt, as already mentioned in the previous two days, was originally created by AJ @ For The Love of Diversity in Books. Let's get started!
How To Quickly & Easily Make Graphics for Blog & Social Media
My blog went through many graphic designs, most of which were made by your truly. In this blog's infancy I used an older version of Corel's Paint Shop Pro exclusively, which I absolutely adore and I may start to use again in the near future.
Currently though I'm using a mix of my own photographs and Canva, and I'm learning how to use Lightroom and Snapseed.
I decided to use my photos in my blog when I realized I had all this unused material from bookstagram, photos I was discarding because they weren't what I wanted for my bookstagram feed, so I decided why not use them on my blog? Which is what you can see on a few of my posts, like Wednesday Chatter.
Canva is a good alternative to Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, a free alternative that is really easy to use. I used it to make my banner and my rating graphics, as well as some other graphics that you can find all over my blog. I use Canva because it's free, but also because it lets me get rid of the headache that is losing my files, which happened once with Paint Shop Pro. It was a time! But Canva allows you to duplicate works, go back and tweak some of them, delete, undo and constantly work on your designs, and I love that!
Snapseed and the free Lightroom app are new to me, and I'm only using them on my travel photography IG, Rubyjotravels. I'm having fun discovering everything that I can do with these apps, and I am using Youtube tutorials heavily at this point, and free "recipes" I find on pinterest or IG. Out of the two I find Snapseed easier to use. I'm not sure if there's a paid version of Snapseed, but I have yet to encounter a feature I have to pay for, as opposed to Lightroom. Usually I tweak a lot of my photos on Lightroom and then more on Snapseed for some fine tuning.
What about you guys? What are you using to create your graphics?
