What’s the first thing that grabs your attention and makes you stop scrolling on social media? It’s the graphics. They make you pause, read, click, or even share. So it makes sense for us to spend a little extra time designing something that actually stands out.
That’s exactly what we’re diving into – how to create eye-catching social media graphics from scratch using free tools. Let’s get started!
How to Make Social Media Graphics
- Find High-Quality Graphics
- Edit Social Media Graphics
- Always Adjust Sizes
- Keep Your Typography Consistent
- Using Color Grids
Let me break down these steps in more detail to show you how to create social media graphics.
1. Find High-Quality Graphics
To get started with your social media graphic design, you’ll need a premade image. You can find these easily on the internet for free. These images come in two variants: Illustrations and Stock Images.
Top 4 Places to Look for Free Illustrations
Illustrations are both engaging and entertaining for a reader. In fact, a lot of big brands, including Google, Uber, Airbnb, and Slack, use them in their marketing to capture attention and add personality to their content.
We have a whole article on the best royalty-free illustration websites, but these are our top picks:
unDraw
unDraw features more than 500 illustrations in every category you can imagine. Here you can find illustrations that fit your product, easily download these in PNG and SVG format, and scale them as per your needs.
Freepik
Freepik offers thousands of free vectors, PSDs, icons, and photos designed by their team or their community of graphic designers. They also have a separate collection of customizable icons called Flaticon and a collection of free Google Slides and PowerPoint templates called SlidesGo.
We have used their illustrations all over our social media channels.
Glaze
Glaze features free illustrations and icons that are used by educational institutions, non-profits, startups, Fortune 500 companies, and individuals alike. They guarantee a curated royalty-free illustration library with premium quality.
Open Peeps
Open Peeps is a library of hand-drawn illustrations that you can use to create scenes of people. You can use human characters as they are or create a completely different one using product design tools.
Top 4 Places to Look for Free Stock Images
If you prefer using real people in your designs, we also have a list of stock photo websites that aren’t boring. But these are some popular places to go:
StockSnap
StockSnap has a large collection of high-quality stock photos that you can use for free – no attribution required. They add hundreds of images on a daily basis, making sure that you never run out of options to choose from.
Pexels
Pexels offers free stock photos and videos that can be used for both personal and commercial purposes. They aim to help millions of creators all over the world create amazing products, designs, and stories using their photos.
Unsplash
Unsplash features images ranging from wallpapers, textures & patterns, current events, food, to spirituality. They claim their website features over a million curated photos contributed by more than 157,866 photographers everywhere.
Pixabay
Pixabay is another well-known website that features over 1.7 million high-quality stock images and videos shared by its talented community. You can easily copy, modify, distribute, and use their images on your social media channels.
Once you have finalized your image, you can start editing as you need.
2. Edit Social Media Graphics
Now that we have a good image, it’s time to edit. This is where we’ll need a design tool. We have listed our top picks below – use these to easily customize and enhance your graphics.
Canva
You must have probably heard about Canva before. It is one of the most used tools by designers and non-designers alike.
This tool comes with really cool premade social media graphic templates, custom image sizes, a drag-and-drop interface, a large selection of fonts and backgrounds, and much more. You can check out their collection here.
Canva is free to use for up to 8,000+ templates, 1GB of storage, and up to 10 team members. Then you’ll have to pay $9.95/mo per user.
Fotoram.io
Fotoram.io is an underrated website for creating social media graphics. The tool allows you to resize images, crop, flip, adjust brightness and contrast, adjust color hue, add blur, add a vignette effect, and much more.
We especially love their Art Maker, which lets you transform your photo into different artistic styles based on famous paintings.
Digifloat
Don’t want to spend hours editing an image? Then Digifloat is your best bet! We have a team of in-house designers who can help you create eye-catching social media graphics, all tailored to your brand’s unique style. That means you don’t have to rely on templates ever!
Just sign up & fill out a design brief – we’ll get your designs back within 24 hours.
Lumen5
We highly recommend using videos on social media. You can use our favorite video creation tool Lumen5. It offers one of the simplest video-making experiences.
You can start by entering a link to a blog post or creating a video from scratch using their premade templates.
In their free plan, you can create five videos per month with a 720p video resolution.
3. Always Adjust Sizes
Have a look at this tweet:
Can you spot the problem with this image?
The content written in the image is not even fully visible. This is what happens when you don’t create an image in the size required by that particular platform.
Every social media platform has a different set of sizes for its social media graphics. A size that works for Facebook will not work for Twitter. You need to make sure you choose the correct size before you start editing, or you can use a free tool from Sprout Social called Landscape to resize your images.
Here’s a quick reference guide to social media graphic sizes for different platforms:
4. Keep Your Typography Consistent
Any non-designer finds the job of selecting the perfect font terrifying. With so many options, it’s easy to see why.
One of the key graphic design tips for social media, while selecting fonts, is readability. The typography shouldn’t be too complicated. An average person who skims through social media posts should be able to get your message clearly.
You can experiment as you like, but if you wish to stick to a safe option, you can use sans-serif. It is considered the best font for the web.
Also, try to stick with a maximum of 3 font types. If you try to add a different font with every new graphic, you’ll lose the consistency required in a brand.
5. Using Color Grids
Brands are distinguished by their colors because they reflect a feeling or emotion that we want to convey. In fact, they set a mood and create a distinctive experience. For example, color Red delivers a feeling of power and excitement. Green conveys health, hope, and nature, whereas the color Blue represents trust, loyalty, and security, and so on. It’s called color psychology.
In general, many brands choose their brand colors for their marketing as well. But we’ll recommend that you go a step further and create color grids on your social media channels. For example, here’s what McDonald’s color grid layout looks like:
Similarly, you can play with your brand’s color palette to create an appealing theme or layout on your social media channels. It will make you instantly recognizable.
Summing Up: How to Make Social Media Graphics
I hope you are all ready to create social media graphics. This is a part of marketing and branding that takes time and commitment. But it also delivers results like no other.
Do you feel like you don’t have the right creative juice in you? Are you struggling to execute the right social media marketing strategy? We have an entire team of in-house designers who would love to transform your brand presence. Just sign up & get social media graphic design services that elevate your content and engage your audience.
