Designing an amazing cover/header for your social media brand (or personal) page can be a bit more involved than it appears. Typically, you’d need to start by researching the correct size and confirming that it’s correct. That usually involves reading a bunch of long articles before even starting to design. It turns out there’s also a lot misinformation when it comes to the correct social media image sizes.

Once you do figure out the proper size, you might realize that your audience can be viewing the cover/header on any wide range of devices such as a desktop computer, a mobile device, a tablet or even a TV. … Yikes … This usually leads to hunting for a template that has all the guides built-in. These are typically only available for software like Photoshop and can be very clunky to use. They include complicated layer groups and don’t even always ensure your image is visible on all devices.

That all changes today with new “Safe Areas” in Stencil! Now you can turn on/off overlays on the canvas that show you exactly where it’s safe to put graphics in your header/cover images, ensuring they won’t be cut off by profile photos or other changes between desktop/mobile/tablet/etc. This is now available for all Stencil plans (even free accounts, yay!) and is automatically enabled for the following cover/header images:

• Facebook Cover
• Twitter Header
• LinkedIn Company Cover
• LinkedIn Personal Cover
• YouTube Channel Art

Just select one of those from the canvas resizer and the “Safe Area” guides will appear. If the overlays ever get in your way, you can always turn the “Safe Area” on or off, using the social media icon to the right of the canvas:

We hope you find this new feature extremely useful and this will make creating header/cover photos a total breeze. Here’s a quick video showing the creation of a Facebook Cover image from start to finish, in less than a couple of minutes:

Let us know in the comments if this was helpful and saved you a ton of time!

The post Create Perfect Social Covers/Headers With New Safe Areas appeared first on Stencil.

You can download a package for each category individually or grab the entire set of 200. Each package comes with images pre-sized for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest as well.

Let us know in the comments if you liked these and if you want us to create more!

The post [FREE] 200 Quote Images To Get You Inspired appeared first on Stencil.

What are Collections and Who Can Use Them?

Think of Collections as your personal categorized file folders. You can name them however you’d like, if you have a special project, ad, campaign, client, etc. Collections are located in the Photos, Icons, Templates, Quotes, Uploads, and Saved Images sections.  The best part about them is that they’re available to EVERY Stencil user! (So tempted to create an “Oprah meme” here but too classy to do that.?)

Where can Collections be found?

There are three ways to access Collections in Stencil.

1. You can right-click on a photo, icon, template, quote, uploaded image, or saved images and a drop-down menu will appear with Collections as an option.

2. Access through the drop-down header list from Featured Photos, Featured Icons, Featured Templates, All Uploads, All Saved Images.

3. The three line icon on every photo will give you access to Collections as well.

How to Create, Edit, and Delete a Collection

Once you access Collections, you’ll find a button to Create Collections and here is where the magic happens. Name the Collection whatever you’d like.

Create multiple Collections at a time and find them listed immediately. You’ll notice a 0 next to them, indicating there are 0 photos in the Collection (see the image below). Add a photo by right-clicking on it to access the drop-down menu and click on the designated Collection the photo belongs to. You’ll see the number change from 0 to 1.

When you access Collections from the Featured Photos, Templates, and Icons areas you can edit and delete Collections.

The Collections are alphabetized as created, however, if you find certain folders need more access than others that are labeled later in the alphabet we’ve considered that this may be an annoying factor to keep scrolling down the list. The four directional arrow is available to move Collections towards the top in the order that you’d access more frequently.

How to Organize Existing Images

What if you’ve been a long time Stencil user going back to the “Share as Image” days? You probably have thousands of images saved just like me. How can you organize all of those existing images and keep a high level of productivity? This is where the keyboard shortcuts will come in handy.

Go to your Saved Images section and to choose the images that you’d like in the same Collection, you can click on CMD for Mac users or click on CTRL for Windows users. Check it out below!

Now, this method works best when you have to pick and choose in between photos. If you have multiple photos that can go into the same collection, you can use the SHIFT button on your keyboard to select a whole bunch of photos at one time. This will be your time-saver! Watch it in action below.

As you can imagine, once you have all your images in order, all of your visual marketing projects will become a breeze to navigate and edit. You’ll have more time to create images and other areas of your business. Just a bit of a shift will make a great difference!

This also applies to Uploaded images. For businesses with products, authors with book covers, photographers with their own photos this is an amazing feature to get Uploads organized! Especially for agencies or virtual assistants who have multiple clients, you can now have Collections named after each client and have all areas completely organized in Stencil.

Click on the circle of the designated Collection to add the photo in it. If you click on the circle a second time, it will remove the image from the Collection. If that happens don’t fret, you haven’t lost anything the photos will always be there just re-click the circle.

How will Collections Increase my Productivity

Think of Collections as filters. All photos will stay in the sections and will not be deleted to go into Collections. You’ll find yourself using Collections to be your first step while creating images. For example, if you know you’ll be focusing on a winter wonderland theme for your next project then your photos will be focused on winter themed images. Hopefully, you’ve accumulated some winter photos already or if not you can simply search them and place them in a Winter Collection.  As you proceed with this project and create multiple images, you’ll go straight to your Winter Collection and this will save you time without having to search every time.

This also captures on-branding images. If there is a certain look that you need for a particular client or brand, a Collection is ideal to have to maintain those photos so you’ll never stray into other ideas. Less of the shiny object syndrome and more focus on the branding style.

What are your thoughts?!

Will you be taking advantage of Collections? We hope so! This has been the #1 requested feature for a long time now and we’ve worked hard to make it work for all Stencil users.

Let us know if you like Collections or if you have any feedback, let us know in the comments!

The post Organize Images and Increase Productivity with Stencil appeared first on Stencil.

What is Social Recruitment?

Social recruitment is about using social media to define and highlight your employer brand to attract candidates. Social recruitment lets you leverage existing social media networks with their millions of users to find the best candidates. It isn’t simply posting job openings on all your social media feeds. It’s about starting a conversation with potential candidates where they spend a lot of their time.

Does Social Recruitment Work?

We all know about LinkedIn, but it’s not the only place you can showcase your employer brand. 31% of jobseekers have found a job through Instagram, with Snapchat and Pinterest close behind. 59% of employees say a company’s social media presence was part of the reason they chose their workplace.

Social Recruitment for Your Social Media Channels

Be sure to include lots of visual content, it makes your recruiting efforts more engaging and effective. Content that contains images attract 94% more total views than content without images. So what kinds of visual content can you create and share to showcase your employer brand? We’ve put together a list of super effective, yet simple social recruiting posts.

9 Types of Social Recruiting Posts

1. Share stories and images that showcase your company culture.
Does your company value diversity, work-life balance, employee happiness and engagement? Tell your potential candidates about it!

 

9. Facebook Jobs Tab

Did you know you can add a “Jobs tab” on Facebook?

Head over to your company’s Facebook page. Hit “Settings,” then “Edit Page.”

Then click “Add Tab” for Jobs.

We hope we’ve provided you with some inspiration for stepping up your social recruiting game! We’d love to hear stories about how you use visual content to promote your employer brand. Leave us a comment below!

The post Social Recruitment: How to Use Social Media to Hire appeared first on Stencil.

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.

Creating designs with amazing fonts can produce extraordinary images! We value your creativity and want to make designing social media images in a snap, however beautiful as well. We’re happy to announce that you can now upload your own fonts plus an awesome feature to access Google Web Fonts. Fonts can make or break a design. Now it’s time to show you how to use the new upload font feature. Let’s get to it!

How to Use the New Upload Font Feature (Plus Google Web Fonts)

First, I have to tell you I’m a bit of a font geek, therefore Stencil’s new upload font feature is the ULTIMATE feature of all time. I’m a fanatic of fonts. Ready to get fontabulous?! (Yes, it’s not a word, but when you’re this excited new words develop.)

Stencil allows up to 50 custom fonts (includes uploaded fonts along with Google fonts). This is awesome news! The sky’s the limit when creating designs. You can now customize your images to match your business brand.

Upload your own fonts

Here are a couple of areas you can access to upload your own fonts.

or you can access by going to the right of the canvas under My Account.

Accessing Google Web Fonts

Using Google Web Fonts has become incredibly easy to use with Stencil, you’ll have direct access to all the open source fonts that can be used however way you’d like. Here’s where you can access the Google Web Fonts while you’re creating your designs in Stencil.

The awesome news about the integration of Google Web Fonts is that we have full international support. We now have font support for Latin (Extended), Arabic, Bengali, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Thai, Vietnamese…just to name a few!

Where can you get more fonts to upload?

There are many creative sites that have bundles of fonts that you can download to your computer. Be warned! It may lead to an obsession… it’s all in the sake of creativity and design, right?

You can find fonts from free to crazy expensive. Whichever fonts you choose to download always check for licensing to make sure you are able to use it freely for your designs.

Here are some sites that you can peruse and potentially find your favorite font:

MyFonts

Creative Market

Luvly Marketplace

Mighty Deals

The HungryJPEG

The most dangerous areas on these sites for the font-obsessed are called bundles. I’ve warned you!

What types of fonts should you choose?

The handwriting script fonts are popular and can be used to accentuate a word or small phrase in your image.

Use script fonts sparingly to create a look you’d like the achieve. Being clear in your message is always a must. People will scroll past an image if they can’t make out the words.

No matter what font you choose to use, make sure it’s legible.

The wonderful thing about uploading your own fonts is that there is such a variety that you can try.

Important Notes About Fonts

Be careful when deleting fonts from the My Fonts tab. If images were created using those fonts, and the fonts have been deleted, the text in those images will default back to Fredoka One. Delete wisely!

The upload fonts feature is exclusively for Pro / Unlimited users only. Sign up to become a Pro or Unlimited user here.

Ready to get Fontabulous?

Choosing from 50 custom fonts to create your designs is a shining light to your creativeness. It’s a liberating experience! We encourage you to upload your fonts and create stunning images for social media, your blog, and more.

Now that you know the ultimate Stencil feature of all time, I need to know, what’s your favorite font?

Here are a few of mine: Sverige Script, TradeMark, Bickley Script Com, and Gabriela-Regular.

Oh, by the way, did you know you can get a free font inspired by Donald Trump called, the Tiny Hand. Check it out here. That’s all I have to say about that. hehe

Let us know what you think of this feature.

Share your images with custom fonts on social media with the hashtag #fontabulous.

Can’t wait to see your designs!

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The post How to Use the New Upload Font Feature (Plus Google Web Fonts) appeared first on Stencil.

Introducing Stencil

We’re pleased to finally announce that Stencil is ready for primetime! Speaking to hundreds of our customers over the past year has been an incredible experience and we’ve learned so much about what you want to have in an image creation tool. Countless hours have been spent trying to solve for all the unique cases and although we’ve come a long way, there’s still a lot to learn.

So just a quick recap of what’s happened:

• Stencil used to be called Share As Image…we changed our name and completely rebuilt our product over the last year.
• Stencil has dozens of new features.
• We’ve designed Stencil to be the fastest and easiest way to create images for sharing on social media (but you create images for other stuff too like blogs, emails, presentations and more)

If you’re an existing Share As Image user, it might take a few minutes to get used to Stencil, but once you see how flexible it is, you’ll never be able to look back.

List of New Stencil Features

Here’s a list of all the new features and enhancements Stencil has that will make creating images crazy fast…

Over 600,000 Photos – Stencil comes loaded with over half a million incredible photos (provided by our friends at Pixabay), ready for you to use in any of your images. They’re all royalty-free “CC0” images, which means you can use them however you want — personal or commercial, with no attribution required.

Over 200,000 Icons – We’ve teamed up with The Noun Project to bring you the best icons on the web. With hundreds of thousands available, you’ll never be limited for icon choices again!

Live social media previews – Never worry again how your image will look after you’ve shared. You’ll see just how it will look once it’s shared.

Instagram Sharing – Send an SMS with your image straight to your phone and get your image on Instagram faster than ever.

Over 40 Beautiful Templates – Create beautiful images even faster with our Pro templates, ready to be edited.

34+ custom canvas sizes for all your needs – We’ve done all the research and pre-loaded the optimal sizes for social networks, ads, blog posts and more. If that’s not enough, create your own!

Upload & Store Multiple Logos – Upload & store every variation of your logo or different logos if you’re creating visuals for different brands.

Stencil Chrome Extension – Right-click an image or highlight text on almost any site and you can add text instantly. Install that here.

…and this is just the start. We have a whole bunch of amazing new ideas planned for the near future. Stay tuned and get ready to have your mind blown.

The post Stencil Has Arrived appeared first on Stencil.