From the course: Social Media for Graphic Designers

Posting images on Instagram

From the course: Social Media for Graphic Designers

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Posting images on Instagram

- [Narrator] Instagram has over 600 million active users and is the best place to showcase your visual creativity to a global audience. Instagram allows you to upload a maximum of 10 images per post, and we'll show you how to fully capitalize on that in an upcoming movie. For now, we're going to create two posts to share our work with the world. So let's do that now. So we're on our profile page for Thug Bunny Design on Instagram, and I'm going to click the plus icon in the bottom middle. And this is how you author a post. It'll take you to your camera roll. And that wolf, by the way, is a recent illustration I did, but we're going to post some other content and it has to do with this illustration of Abraham Lincoln. So I'm kind of showcasing my creative process in a little sense. This is the artwork within Illustrator, as I was coloring and doing the detail. And we're going to click on the far right icon in gray, the little stack, this is how you post multiple images. You click that. And then if you go back into your camera roll, you can see it's put a one, it's tagged that image as that's the first image you're posting with this specific post you're doing. And then if you click another one, this will be the second one. So I basically want to show the environment within Illustrator as I'm creating it, and then show a nice kind of zoomed in detailed shot because this artwork is better appreciated when you see it up close and you can see the textures that run through it in the little speckles of texture that we have in it as well. So now that we've selected these two images, we'll go ahead and click next. And this is the stage where you can go through and you can apply any filter you want on this image. Now I rarely use these. I only use these if I'm taking a photograph with my iPhone and maybe it's of a drawing where I'm drawing out shading, then I might adjust the contrast so it looks better than what I captured taking the photo. But because the images that we're using here are ones that I took screen captures on my desktop and just cropped them. We don't need to do that. The color looks fine. So we're going to click next. And you can see the images load in. And if you tap those, you can preview them, make sure they look good, tap out, and we just need to create our narrative here. And so I'm going to go ahead and paste in the narrative that we've wordsmithed and ran through Grammarly, and this is going to work good. So we'll go ahead and click okay. And the narrative here is just kind of sharing some insights into how I created this artwork that I first initially digitally ink this using Adobe Fresco, then moved it to Adobe Illustrator on my desktop. And then I'm pointing them back to my site because I have posters of this design that people can get if they want to on my website. But one thing you need to be reminded of in Instagram is you cannot have active links within your text on an Instagram post. I can't put a URL in there because it'll just be static text. Nobody will be able to click on it. Hashtags you'll be able to click onto, but hashtags can't really connect to a specific page on a specific website. So this is why it's important to have a URL in your profile. Because if I mentioned that they can go to my profile and they can click on that link and get access to where they could find that poster in this case. So notice that the end of my post I put, you can find a poster of this design on my website via the link in my profile. We're going to go over a little more about that in another movie, but I just wanted to point that out here. The next thing I want to do is I want to associate this with the location where my studio is based at, and that's Salem, Oregon. So I'm just going to tap that, and tag people. Let's say you did a project in collaboration with another designer then you'd want to tag them in this post. That way they get recognition for some of the work that's being posted. Now, for example, right now I'm in the middle of designing some school mascots. And I'm working with a friend of mine who runs his agency out of California. So when we're all done with that, and I start sharing some of those images, I'm going to be tagging him in the post. So that's the value of having the ability to tag other people in their account on Instagram, within your posts. Don't get in the habit, and this happens, to a lot of people misuse tagging, where they'll tag everybody to try to get their attention. You don't want to do that. That's like the wrong, that's antisocial media in my opinion. So don't do that. Facebook, if you have different social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr's listed here, you can link those to your Instagram account. So if I wanted to post this on Facebook too, and I didn't want to change anything, then I could simply tap and select that. And then it would automatically post on Facebook or a Twitter account, et cetera. I don't use this feature that much, so I'm not going to do that. But we have everything needed now for the post. So we'll go ahead and click share. Your timeline will come up on the screen under the home icon at the bottom left, and then you'll see your posts show up. So this is what everybody who receives this in their timeline, once again, remember all social media is throttled to one degree or next. When and if they see it, you can't control. But if it does show up in their feed, this is what they're going to see. And then they can simply look at the images like this. Now, one thing I want to point out is again, just to remind you that all of the posted images throughout the previous movies and including this one have all been 1,500 by 1,500 at 150 to 200 PPI. Now I'm telling you that because the image recommendations that Instagram suggests aren't iron clad. And when you pinch zoom on these, I'll do that now, you can see these look pretty crisp. Even when I zoom into it quite a bit, you can see the detail. And that's why I post images this high, because this style specifically is just really nice to look at large. If you used Instagram's suggested sizes, that's going to be 72 PPI, and it's going to look kind of lossy. You're going to start seeing pixels immediately. Now I can go in even farther and you'll start to see how it gets a little lossy because it is a pixeled image. But if you're at this size, it's just nice and kind of crisp. And that's why I use that resolution. And that's the whole reason why I break the rules in terms of doing that. So with that said, let's make one more post here. So we're going to go back here and tap the plus icon. I'm going to go ahead and share another project. And that project is going to be where I grew up in Washington. There was a really cool nature trail by our house. So that's what I want to share now. And this is going to be another multi-image post, but instead of two, we're going to do four and I'm going to select this one. So you can see the first image here. And this is a design I did. And if you're interested in the full creative process, just check out dvglab.com because I go through this specific project and show you how I set it up and created it and what inspired it. So now with that first image selected, we're going to select the icon, that's the multi-image icon here. So you can see it puts a one. We want this one to be the second one. These are all the textures, bitmap TIFF textures placed into Illustrator and color that are in this file. And it's just one giant mask. And if you look at key line view in Illustrator, I mean, you'd never want to give this file to a client. It's just a mess, but it looks great. I would never give the client a vector file like this. I would rasterize it. And where it all started was analog, so I'm showing my sketch as well. So once again, this is kind of the process oriented posts and these are really great to do on Instagram. They're very engaging. People love to see behind the creative curtain as it will, and see who's pulling the levers and how you're doing that to create what you create. So we're going to go ahead and go to next. We're not going to apply any filters, so we'll just hit next again. And once again, you can preview your images here. So this is what people are going to see when they scroll through it, we'll assign the location. We're not going to post it to any other platform, but we are going to craft our narrative. And this one I'll just type out, and this is always kind of hit or miss because there's autocorrect on an iPhone. I'm sure Android has that as well at times, you know, because you've probably seen images of how autocorrect really can kind of mess up some things when you're typing it in. So we'll do the best job we can here. And then I'm going to show you how I use Grammarly on my iPhone just to check it, to make sure I got everything looking good. So this is a nature trail inspired. I can't talk and type at the same time. So I'll just go ahead and write and then comment afterwards. So as you start typing in a hashtag, it'll give you suggestions. And if you like those, you can click on them. Every now and then I'll click on them. But I like when it's kind of describing something, I like keeping the capital letters in there. The hashtag still works, but the common formatting is using nothing but lowercase. And it's hard to read certain things. Like if you go down below that's nature trail sketchbook, but it's kind of hard to read that. But if you capitalize the first letter in each name, in my opinion, makes it easier to read. So I kind of ignore their formatting. That just more informs me that there are hashtags out there that exist using that name, which is fine in this case, I don't need exclusive one and we'll add texture. And I think that looks good, but we're going to check it now. So notice in the bottom, underneath the keyboard, you see that globe, and this is where you can load different keyboards into, in this case, iOS on the iPhone. And I purchased the Grammarly one because I can tap on that and you see the Grammarly logo in the green G icon. And if I tap that, it's going to go through my post and look at things and sure enough, there it is. It flagged the TIFF word because that's not a proper word in a dictionary, but as the designer and the creative industry, we know exactly what that is. So in which case, I don't want it to change. And I find this part a little unintuitive, you click the trash can to ignore. A trash can to me says you want to delete it. Well, I don't want to delete it, but in this case we will. So I'll do that and oh wow. Okay, I feel really good now because she usually finds more mistakes when I'm typing, in this case it didn't. So that always surprises me, so that's a good thing. We have everything ready to go image wise, everything ready to go text wise, so we can click share. Once again, it'll switch to your timeline under home in the bottom left nav. And there's our posts that people can see if it shows up in their timeline and they'll be able to scroll through it and look at things. And once again, they'll also be able to zoom in on this. Now this is a lot smaller in terms of the detailing, but they'll still be able to zoom in and appreciate the detailing on this post. So, anyway, I just wanted to show that, I wanted to show you Grammarly in context of iOS, because most of my posts I do. Well on Instagram, all my posts, because you can't post from the desktop, you can just view it from the desktop. Instagram is known for its square format. And if you haven't noticed, I pretty much use that across all platforms. So I only have to create one set of images and then simply broadcast them through all the various social media accounts I have which saves me a lot of time. It's more efficient in my opinion, to do it that way. Instagram is a fun, easy, and engaging way to share your work. And art directors, creative directors, and marketing people use it to search, browse feeds, curate posts, and discover new talent all the time. So the more you post the better your opportunity for connecting and landing new clients and work.

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