Create Awesome Event Images with Canva
If you’re not using images on as many event listings and related social media posts as you can, you’re missing out! Using images will help folks connect with and remember your event. And that’s not just hyperbole—as John Medina writes in his hit pop-science book Brain Rules:
We are incredible at remembering pictures. Hear a piece of information, and three days later you’ll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65%.
If you’re on board with using images in theory, but feel like you can’t create images yourself and/or don’t have a designer you can rely on, your best bet is to use the free web app Canva to create all the images you need!
Why Canva is a Great Choice
Canva is a lot like Loxi: Simple, well-designed, and hosted in the cloud. So you can create images easily from anywhere. It’s also a free web app, and while you can pay for extra features, you can use the free version indefinitely and without limitations to create awesome images.
Canva also offers a bunch of templates for social media images, for example (more on that later). It’s a fantastic tool.
For now, sign up at Canva.com, come back, and let’s create a Loxi event image!
What Makes a Good Event Image?
There are a few types of things that contribute to a good event image. You should not be creating text-heavy images, for example—the goal is not to create a flyer for your event. The goal is to simply add some aesthetic flair to your otherwise prove-heavy event listings.
Think about what looks good on mobile, and what’s tasteful. Can you incorporate a photo of your event in action, for example? If you’re going with illustrations, logos, and/or symbols, keep things simple, clean, and don’t use too many colors or textures.
Check out our other blog post, Using Featured Images, to learn more about what makes a great event image.
First Things First: The Loxi Event Header Image
The first thing you’ll want to do is create the main header image for your event. This is the image you’ll upload on Loxi directly, for example.
The ideal size for these images is a landscape image with 1440px x 650px dimensions. Once you upload this, some smaller versions will be auto-generated by Loxi itself for use on mobile devices and so on.
The Next Steps: Social Media Images
Now that you’ve got your primary image created, use it as inspiration to spin off tailor-made versions for the main social media channels you want to promote on.
This is worth the time. Buffer, for example, tested using images on Twitter and found that tweets with images had 150% more retweets and 89% more favorites than the same tweets without images.Canva is absolutely awesome here, because they have a whole set of pre-made templates for “social media images” that can save you time.
Other Considerations
Don’t use too much text—if you use it on a sponsored post or ad on Facebook, it’ll likely get denied. You can find a more detailed breakdown of Facebook’s rules about text in images on their Business Help website.
That page is worth checking out even if you don’t plan to use Facebook at all, because the principles outlined there are good for design generally, and following their recommended best practices will help keep your images focused and not overrun by text, making for cleaner, better-looking ad images.
Creating images for events that engage your targeted audience is a key part of gaining traction for your event. Canva allows you to create that content quickly and easily, even if you you’re lacking in the graphic design department.
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