How to create amazing Blog Graphics

I noticed how appreciative bloggers were of the blog graphics we provided during Winterabc2020. But did you know you can create your own great blog visuals without any designing background?

Blogging has led me down so many paths. I have been an editor, a web developer, social media manager, digital marketer, brand manager and recently I became a graphic designer.

The importance of blog graphics

• People respond better to images than text
• Posts with images are more likely to be engaged with on social media than those without.
• Great visuals are perceived to be a sign of a serious blogger.
• Graphics are aesthetically pleasing to the eye giving your blog a lasting impression on the mind of the reader.
• Images can boost your SEO ranking by appropriately labeling each image ALT.

Blog graphics surely bring so many benefits to your blog. Now let us take a look at where you may use these graphics.

Types of Blog graphics

Feature Images

These are the images that appear along with your link when the post is shared. They also appear on your blog archive page. These ought to be related to what your blog posts are about because they determine whether your link will be clicked or not.

To insert a featured image in WordPress, go to your posts settings between the tags and excepts slots.

Blog Quotes

WordPress provides the pull quotes option to help you make your main ideas visually stand out from the main body text. But you can also go a step further and make an image quoting your major points for readers who love to scan articles.

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Blog Infographics

These can be used to capture a summary of your whole blog posts or to illustrate some visual statics using bar graphs and pie charts. Infographics can be made into PDF which can be easy to download resources for your readers

Blog Header

This is the image that appears on the top bar of your blog. Usually, blog headers take the form of a banner or an elongated rectangle

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Blog Logo

A blog logo is helpful in many ways. It identifies your blog as an independent brand. You can also watermark every image you use on your site with your logo for easy marketing. Every person who will reuse your images will carry your brand along.

Tools for blog graphic designs.

As I said above there are many tools that can be used. For the purpose of this post, I am going to stick to user-friendly and free tools and sites.

Free Image Sites

For your featured images you can get loads of free images from free royalty photo image sites such as
Pexel
Unsplash
Pixabay.

These sites enable you to use their photos without crediting. We encourage you to credit the image photographer whenever possible so that you promote other creatives and you build yourself into this valuable habit.

The biggest challenge African bloggers face with these sites is the absence of relatable images. Most of the photos are Western and European making it difficult to find an ln image that adequately relates to our blog post setting.

You may consider using your own photos but they also pose a challenge of having undesirable backgrounds or include irrelevant objects.

Remove Bg

To remove a photo background I have found remove.bg to be very reliable. The example below shows the first photo with an original background. The second photo with removed background used to create a graphic with text.

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Snapseed

For professional photo editing, I have found snapseed to be my go-to application. It is easy to use with great filters and tutorials. You can use this app to crop and or erase undesirable objects from your photos.

Canva

There is a reason I dint include Canva on free image sites. Canva is much more of a graphic designing site /app integrated with Pexel and Pixabay. Canva has a lot of templates designed by professionals. You can easily save time by editing these templates for your blog to produce fabulous graphics.

For beginners, I suggest that you begin by editing already provided templates until you get the hang of things. Canva also has a design school that teaches the basics of designing such as how to use colors, filters, and fonts.

If you are an experienced or intermediary Canva user you can experiment with breaking apart or merging templates and personalizing them to suit your needs

unDraw

Another great site for blog graphics is Undraw.co On this site, you find SVG graphics that you can color personalize to suit your blog aesthetics. All you have to do is search what you need using a keyword such as social media.

You can embed the link for faster loading or download the image and incorporate it on your canva designs to create a professional graphic with text.

It takes practice and more practice to get to the level you want. Keep on trying. I hope this article was helpful and so resourceful. Now take time to share with me what you use for your great blog visuals.