The Complete Guide to PosterMyWall For Businesses
Note: To learn about designing with PosterMyWall in video format, consider watching our graphic design tutorial videos on Gradient.
Entrepreneurs are full of ideas, enthusiasm, grit and tenacity – but what are the two things that entrepreneurs usually don’t have enough of? Time and money.
We have the perfect solution to your problem!
With PosterMyWall, you can create HD quality graphics that look impressive but won’t break the bank. And you can do this in just four simple steps! First, browse through our templates gallery. You’ll find an assortment of categories with templates for both images and videos. Then, customize the design with your text and personal photos, videos or stock graphics. Once you’re done uploading your content, save and download your design. You can share your creation on social media or print it for distribution.
1) Choose a template
Let’s face it. Using a graphic designer to develop your new company’s logo, business letterhead, sales flyers and ads is an expensive and time-consuming process. Depending on your budget, it’s just plain unaffordable.
That doesn’t mean you have to learn know how to use Photoshop or Illustrator or CorelDRAW – or go without. You just need to find an online tool that does the graphic design work for you.
The beauty of PosterMyWall is that it is template-driven. So you don’t have to design anything from scratch (although you can) --- you just need to know what you like. Entrepreneurs can choose from thousands of templates to create awesome business cards, flyers, posters, videos or ads. Templates are searchable by industry or type of collateral.
The important thing to consider when choosing a template is layout. All other elements of the design can be edited to suit your needs, so focus on a look that expresses your company’s personality.
2) Customize the template
The next step is to customize the template. Hovering your mouse over the template reveals all the editable fields – which is nearly every field on the template.
It’s important for entrepreneurs to define their brand. Making a one-of-a-kind collateral is key to being authentic and recognizable. You don’t want your corporate communications to look like they came off the shelf.
Don’t worry. Even with its template-driven design, the possibilities with PosterMyWall are endless. You can edit text, images, videos and backgrounds with really cool filters, effects, color gradients and fonts—even upload your own images, videos and fonts.
Here’s a Dance Party Flyer that I customized for my Karaoke Night in just a minute:
When editing colors use the “Choose from design” feature to point to any color on your design and select it as the color for other elements, allowing you to replicate colors throughout a marketing piece exactly. So the blue in your logo is exactly the same blue that is in your headline. You have two brand colors? No problem! You can easily introduce a gradient background that adds amazing visual interest by transitioning between the two.
It’s also incredibly easy to incorporate photos and videos with PosterMyWall, either as backgrounds or within the design. You can upload your own or choose from thousands of stock resources from four libraries—Getty Images (comes with additional cost), Pixabay, Flickr or StoryBlocks.
Enhancing Effects and Masking
Allocate some time to experiment with various effects to enhance your images. Besides the usual cropping and rotating, you can vary the opacity of the image with a slider bar, fading it if you just want it to convey a subliminal message. You can change any image to either black and white or sepia – or invert it for an edgy artistic effect. The Glow filter makes images really pop off the page. Edge effects run the gambit from various shapes to modern edge effects like “scratched” and “torn paper.”
One of my favorite image editing features is Mask. You can upload your own image and then just pull out one element. Simply click points around an object and the Poster Maker uses complicated mathematics (and a tiny bit of magic) to make the outline snug around the subject. Click on Mask and voila! You can pull any object into your graphic design.
The Mask tool may appear daunting at first, but it takes almost no practice to get the hang of it. But you can also pick a shape for masking, if you’re not comfortable with the freehand option. To learn more about masking, check out our blog post “Introducing Masking with Text and Shapes!“
The intuitive tool makes customization really easy and the more you play with it, the more you discover how much it can do. Saving projects to your free PosterMyWall account means you’ll never lose your reference point. After you establish the fonts, colors and images that define your brand, saving projects is a great way to maintain a consistent look and feel.
If you’re on the PosterMyWall Premium (or Premium Plus) subscription plan, we have an alternative to masking too. The Remove Background tool allows you to completely remove the background from your image with the click of a button. It works great on photos with people.
3) Re-size, Collaborate and Share on social media
Re-sizing your finished template allows you to create an entire set of marketing pieces, including posters, flyers, banners, and business cards from a single design. I just re-sized my Carnival Flyer here, so I can put up a post on my store’s Facebook and Instagram pages.
As previously mentioned, you can resize your design to create a Facebook ad, a Pinterest Graphic, or a digital leaderboard. If the pre-set sizes for posting on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ and Etsy aren’t enough, you can customize your design to any size – in pixels, inches or millimeters.
While printed materials continue to be one of the most effective ways for entrepreneurs to reach new audiences, if you’re not using PosterMyWall to build a social following, you’re missing out.
A social media post with graphics always gets much more engagement than a plain text post:
BONUS: Free PosterMyWall social media graphics have no watermarks!
You can take your image downloads one step further further, and really up your marketing campaign game with video downloads. Convert your image design into a video, by simply replacing the image with a video - upload a personal video file, or use one from our stock gallery. With a simple click, you’ll get greater engagement on all your social media accounts!
Here’s how we made our Sale post for Instagram much more captivating by simply replacing the background image with a video:
Sharing to social media sites is super easy. Once you’re done customizing your image or video design, click on the SHARE option and choose to share your design online. You can then post directly to your Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter or email account. You can also grab the link to share manually or grab the html code so you can embed the image in your blog (you know you MUST have a blog, right??).
Another great feature is the ability to share projects among team members. With one click you can share a finished project for team review---or you can work collaboratively on a project with team members.
4) Download or publish
As much as people claim that it is a paperless world, at some point you are going to need printed collateral to get yourself in front of your potential customers. With PosterMyWall you can download a high resolution file and print locally. The turnaround time is as fast as your local print shop can do it, allowing entrepreneurs using PosterMyWall to design, download and print promotional flyers or posters in just a few hours. With that kind of flexibility, you can turn on a dime to take advantage of the changing business landscape to cash in on an unexpected opportunity.
Whether you need to print flyers for your next work event, or want to create a video to upload to your social media account, PosterMyWall has everything you need. Start designing today!
