Creating cover photos for Facebook has never been so easy; Today we have more resources at our fingertips than at any other time. Anyway, before I start giving you my professional tips for designing your social content, how much creativity did you put into your last cover photo?
If you’re like most small business owners, you probably haven’t invested as much creativity at all, which is a shame.
Your Facebook photo represents an extremely important piece of your Facebook page; however, many companies miss it completely.
Not only should your cover photo look good, but it should also serve a purpose and represent your brand appropriately. In this article, we’ll talk about several key tips for designing highly effective cover photos for your Facebook page.
Let us begin.
How to create cover photos for Facebook
Select a target for your cover photo
Believe it or not, a cover photo can be more than just a logo on a dull-colored background.
While they can be great for branding purposes, cover photos can also help you achieve other business goals. This could be generating registrations or subscriptions for your products, announcing a sale, or promoting an upcoming webinar.
When creating cover photos for Facebook, design with the measures recommended by the network
There are three things that are certain in life: death, taxes, and Facebook changing its design.
Obviously, one of the things that take a hit when Facebook changes its design is the cover photo itself. For this reason, you must stay ahead of every aspect and make sure to always use the proper dimensions.
At the moment, the Facebook cover photo supports 820 x 312 pixels on desktop screens. On smartphones, it supports 640 x 360 pixels. Therefore, you may want to consider sending the key pieces of your cover photo to the center so they are not cropped on mobile devices.
While Facebook claims that your cover photo can be a minimum of 399 x 150 pixels, I personally don’t recommend using a lower resolution than Facebook supports for your cover photo on desktop computers.
Consistency in the brand
We mentioned that a cover photo shouldn’t always be a company logo on a background, which is true. However, regardless of the goal you are trying to achieve, we always recommend branding consistency through your cover photo. When creating cover photos for Facebook you should consider that using a style guide for social networks will be essential for your entire online presence.
Now, how do you maintain brand consistency when designing cover photos?
These are some things to consider.
Color range
Whenever possible, try to include your brand colors. As users continue to interact with your brand, you will infiltrate their unconscious, as long as you maintain consistency in your brand elements.
Blue is a staple color in our brand kit, so it’s no surprise that we used it in our cover photo. When users visit our website, they find exactly the same shade of blue.
Fonts and typefaces
It is not mandatory that they necessarily use the same font in each of the cover photos. In fact, that would be a bit boring.
However, the font itself should represent your brand. For example, if you sell luxury watches, your fonts will most likely contain crisp lines and allow easy reading.
On the other hand, it makes sense for children’s play areas like Cosmic Adventures to use eye-catching fonts.
Secondary elements
Almost all companies use brand colors and fonts. However, perhaps you should use secondary elements in all your marketing. These could include graphics, shapes, icons, or other design elements to complement your brand. So when creating cover photos for Facebook you will not have to limit your design to a typeface without more design elements.
Help Scout helpdesk software is a great example of a business using secondary elements to highlight its brand. When you see their cover photo, you notice the complex icon interwoven with labels.
So when you take a tour of their blog, you will notice that they use the same graphics and icons within the images they present.
Whenever I see one of these cleverly designed icons, I immediately think of Help Scout.
Make your profile photo and cover photo work together
Although we are dedicating the entire article to the design of an effective cover photo, we will not neglect to talk a little about your profile photo. This is because your profile photo should match your cover photo very well. When creating cover photos for Facebook consider that generating synergy between your profile photo and cover photo will increase the cohesion of your content and style. Therefore you will have more possibilities to acquire new followers
The best way to achieve this is if you make sure that your profile photo uses the same style guidelines as your cover photo. If your profile photo is mostly red, it would look pretty bad next to a cover photo that is mostly yellow.
Finance company TD Canada does an excellent job of making your profile photo and cover photo go together very well. As usual, TD set his profile picture with his trademark logo on a green background. This gives it a great look in contrast to your black and white cover photo with green design elements.
Not only do the colors match, but all the elements in green stand out beautifully on the page.
Ensure adequate contrast
So far we’ve covered more about the fundamentals of cover photos. Let’s shift our focus to some design principles.
Before you get scared, and before creating cover photos for Facebook I warn you that we are not going to analyze complex design theories. The truth is, even a beginner can succeed with a little basic design knowledge.
Now, what is one of the most important design concepts for a beginner to understand?
In my opinion, the contrast.
Using the right contrast will give your graphic an impact and make it legible. Contrast is what makes Apple’s announcements so impactful.
The main (and most common) way to achieve contrast is through colors. If you use a white background, you would surely like to use dark text. Similarly, if you use a dark background, you would surely like to use light text.
Now, what if you don’t just use black and white colors? This is where a color wheel comes in handy. In essence, the colors on the opposite ends of the wheel will represent the perfect contrast. This is what you should focus on.
The next important element of contrast is size. Basically, you should use a larger text size for headlines, and smaller text sizes for content. This creates an obvious distinction between the two, which will allow your title to stand out.
Lastly, contrast positioning allows you to create a hierarchy of items solely by using different alignments.
We see an excellent example of the integration of all this in the cover photo of the Golden State Warriors basketball team. The bright yellow contrasts perfectly with the dark blue, and they use a subtle size contrast in their text.
Use of white space for your benefit
When creating cover photos for Facebook consider that non-designers usually tend to overdesign. That is, they add too many colors, too many fonts, and put too much “stuff” on their cover photo.
One way to get around this is by using white space.
White space is virtually any part of your graphic that is “unused” Helps separate text, objects, and other elements in your design.
Although there are many advantages to using white space, the biggest benefit is that it keeps your chart clean and helps the reader focus on the most important information.
Let’s look at this simplistic use of white space as an example.
Because there is too much white space (in fact, it is all there is), the text immediately attracts your attention.
You need to determine the purpose of your cover photo and make sure you use the proper size. Subsequently, you need to make sure that your brand is consistent. Lastly, you’ll need to use a few key design principles like contrast and white space to ensure that your cover photo really hits the spot.
Follow these key tips and you will be on the right track to creating highly effective cover photos for your Facebook page.
