How to Create Visual Consistency on Social Media
Using cohesive visuals on social media is essential for solidifying your brand identity, as a blogger or entrepreneur. To put it more specifically, when I say "visuals," I'm referring to the photography and graphics that are used to promote yourself and your brand.
“Using cohesive visuals on social media is essential for solidifying your brand identity.”
To really ensure that things are consistent, it’s helpful to have a mood board to reference. A mood board is a carefully curated selection of images that you select to represent your brand. You select these images by keeping a specific look and feel in mind that you want to represent the “personality” of your brand.
By having a mood board established, beforehand, you have a guide that can help you to be consistent across all social media platforms. Consistency is created using 3 elements: consistent styles, consistent colors, and consistent fonts. Doing this automatically makes your blog or business appear more polished and professional on social media. And trust me, when I say that counts for a lot these days, when there’s a ton of noise online. People’s attention spans are so short and it’s hard to make them take you seriously, when you have a bunch of random photos just thrown together.
Consistent styles
Once you define your brand personality, think about how this would translate into a certain style for your photos. Would you consider it minimalist? Bold and bright? Cool and fresh? To give you some hints, you often see artsy types of people stick with minimalist graphics, where they choose one simple font on a white or neutral background. It’s simple, but you automatically recognize it.
For me, I consider my brand personality to be bright, bold, warm, and inviting for women, so that’s why I use bold and bright colors and images, and I use a ton of pink. For spas or even natural juice companies, you’ll often see lots of green, or leaves, with accents of white. They’re trying to portray the image of freshness.
Consistent colors
Once you determine an image style, the next step is to be sure you are consistent in the colors that you're choosing. I know it can be tempting to get into a tool, like Canva, and get busy with playing around with ALL THE TEMPLATES, but that’s a mistake when you’re creating a brand that you want people to notice and take seriously. You need to choose templates and colors that all compliment each other, based on your brand personality and the style you want. Once you decide on them, stick to them.
Related: How to Create Your Own Beautiful Color Palette
Consistent fonts
This one is huge. One of the worst things is scrolling through a social media profile and seeing a different font on each image. There is absolutely no reason in the world why you should use that many fonts to represent ONE blog or business. My rule of thumb is to stick with 2 or 3 fonts. For my quotes, I have two fonts that I alternate between. This even makes it easier for you because you don’t have to keep thinking about which fonts you will use every time you make a graphic. You’ll have your go-to fonts and you pop them right in.
Related: How to Create the Best Font Pairings (as a beginner)
Nailing down your signature look for social media can be a challenge in the beginning, but with a bit of trial and error, you'll start to develop your own style and it'll eventually become effortless to you!
