New Section Names.

We changed things up on Stencil’s side navigation to make things a bit more clear. The old “Backgrounds” section is now called “Photos” and the old “Icons & Graphics” section is now just “Icons“.

If you’re on a paid account, all of your Logos/Watermarks and Saved Images have been moved down under the Account section. That goes for all of your Uploads as well (more on that below).

New Unified Uploads Area.

Before, we used to handle the images you uploaded differently based on which section you uploaded them to. In the new “Unified” Uploads area all of your uploads now live together happily where you can quickly get to them.

Any image can now be a “Background” or a “Resizable” image.

One of the most beloved parts of Stencil has always been the way we handle background images. We do all the thinking for you and resize all photos to fit your canvas either by resizing at the width or the height of an image — depending on which is larger. This allows you to quickly click through images and see how they’ll look without having to think about resizing…While this does work great most of the time it’s not a perfect approach. Sometimes you may want more control of your image size or sometimes you may want to have multiple images on the canvas at once (i.e. a collage).

This was all possible before, but you needed to upload your images to a specific section, which could get pretty annoying. Now any image in Stencil can be a “Background” image or a “Resizable” image. When selecting an image on the canvas use this new option in the toolbar to swap between image types for more flexibility and control:

Drag to Canvas.

You could always drag & drop images to the canvas, but now with the new ways to use photos, we’ve introduced a quick way for you to select a “Background” or “Resizable” image by dragging it onto a particular “zone” on the canvas. This is just one way of an adding an image, you can of course always click a thumbnail and then “Convert to resizable image” if you want to have more refined control of it.

Drag to Reorder

Now you can drag & drop to reorder your Saved Images, Templates or Uploads! Just click and drag the little 4-way-arrow icon located on the right of your image thumbnails when hovering.

Drag to Anywhere

Here’s a fun one! Now you can drag an image to anywhere on the entire screen in Stencil and it’ll upload:

There’s been a few other less notable updates, those are:

• We now have a knowledge base widget located right within Stencil. It’s full of great tips on using Stencil and you also contact us right from within the widget. Just click on the small buoy icon in the bottom left corner of Stencil if you need help!
• If you have any uploaded fonts (or custom selected Google Fonts), they should now load much faster in the canvas.
• We’ve added about 40,000 new stock photos to Stencil since the last update, putting us at around 1,040,000 photos total!
• We’ll now remember the last font you used in a text field and keep it selected.
• Various bug fixes and improvements across Stencil.

We hope you like some of the new introductions and please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions!

The post New Unified Uploads Section, Resizable Photos & More! appeared first on Stencil.

Social media marketing can be a chore finding out what your audience would like to see, let alone creating images that will entice potential customers. Here at Stencil, we want to make social media graphics easy and fast for business owners. We’re making big strides in making sure that Stencil can become your go-to image tool. The faster and easier it is for you to make social media images, the better your business will flow with social media graphics made easy with templates.

Stencil’s Template Feature Makes Social Media Graphics Easy

If you’re new to Stencil, you can find an area in Stencil called Templates (left-side in between Icons & Graphics and Quotes). This is where you can find a template that can be used for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and more.

You’ll find that there are a variety of templates to choose from and underneath the Featured button, you can click on All to get a dropdown of different categories that would fit your needs. Have a look:

What are templates?

 

Templates help in different ways for each individual.

For some people, when they’re ready to create a social media image, they know exactly what they’re looking for but not sure how to put it together. Templates become a source of inspiration. They may not use the templates and start fresh or they’ll use a few elements and create a whole other look.

Some people are not sure how to start a social media graphic, and templates become their guide. The awesome thing about templates is that you can choose to do whatever you want with it. You’re not stuck with all of it, if you don’t want.

There may be certain fonts and colors you like about a template and change out the background to fit your needs. Or you may not like the colors and simply change the color.

A template can be used for each social media platform and saved in the My Templates section. This will be another time saver when creating images.

You can save the new image as a template with the button shown below.

What’s the purpose of templates?

Templates are used to make social media graphics easier and to keep a consistent look, especially for branding purposes. As a business, you may have a branding style guide to keep images consistent. The fonts, colors, design elements can be kept intact for future use. Therefore when all of the branding elements are saved on a template, it’s just a matter of switching out backgrounds and text. Fast and easy!

Keeping templates will keep your tasks more productive every day and not having to think about what to do for each image.

The Updates

Stencil’s goal is to listen to feedback of users and make Stencil better for everyone to use. We had an overwhelming request for more templates so we are adding at least 20 new templates every week! No more searching for ideas or inspiration to help create social media images. You’ll have new images to try out as a template.

Other awesome news about updates is that we have a new notification bell of updates that have been made to inform you of changes. Now every time something new has been added or an improvement has been made, you’ll know first thing when you’re using Stencil.

Check it out below! The notification bell is next to My Account while you’re creating your image.

If you’re curious to see the log of updates, you can always check here.

Wrapping up templates and updates

Creating social media graphics are so much fun to create when you have a source of inspiration and guide to help you. Stencil templates can now be that source of inspiration you need.

Let us know which template you like best and if you like the new notification bell in the comments.

The post Social Media Graphics Made Easy with Templates (Plus Updates) appeared first on Stencil.