question number one do you have business cards of course you do we all have been told that having
business cards is like the most important thing you can possibly have as a creative
question number two when was the last time you actually gave one of your business cards
to someone well yeah we haven't met anyone new since like last march so
personally i can't even remember i bet you anything that you have one of these
little boxes somewhere in your house that you haven't even touched since last march
does this mean that business cards are irrelevant well yes and no let me explain
hey you guys welcome back to our channel the number one place for people who love design
art and all things creative my name is laszlo you are watching Dantier and Balogh's channel
D+B for short in this video i want to give you some icon design tips because i believe
you should update your instagram highlight covers with some personalized artwork hear me out here's
my theory this part of your instagram here this is your business card for now at least until
things can get back to quote unquote normal and we are safe to live our social lives once again
just like your work clothes and your rail card i'm guessing your business cards are going to remain
untouched for a while so while we are waiting i think it's quite a nice and trendy thing to do
to up yourself branding a little bit and talk about insta highlight cover design i want to give
you four great tips to design an icon set that you can use as instagram highlight covers i'm saying
i concept but they don't actually have to be icons you can do whatever you want with these highlights
more on that later i'm going to use adobe illustrator for mike's and pluto back up my points
but i'm going to talk in terms of principles and general advice so you can apply this any way you
want if you want to make these in photoshop if you want to use canva if you want to hand draw
some it's your choice just do whatever fits your brand the most are you ready let's go
in my example i'm going to show you how i have designed a new set of highlight covers
for jacqueline's personal instagram account we have felt that her old covers are just a little
bit outdated it doesn't say much about her or her personal brand per se not to mention they
were a little bit hard to read so my very first tip would be to think of a style that really does
complement your brand it doesn't really matter if it's a business account you have
where you have a logo as your profile picture or if it's your personal account with a photo
of yourself the point is these highlights need to feel like they belong to your account in jaclyn's
example you can see we have this id style picture of her face so what i did is take some of the
colors that you can see here these autumn peachy orangy shades of her makeup and based on these i
have built up my basic color scheme that i'm going to use now if you want to take this a step further
you can actually come up with an even stronger concept that works only for your brand what i
mean by this is let's say you are a makeup artist and all your posts are about beauty and different
makeups eyeshadows that kind of stuff you could do color fills with a little bit of a sparkle on top
and create a set like that that sort of resembles you know an eyeshadow palette or let's say you're
a photographer you could do like you know camera lenses if you like to repair cars you can do like
you know little tires the point is to use this circular quirky quite weak picture format and use
it to your advantage some of it's something clever because they're going to make your brand memorable
of course if it's a personal account like what we are dealing with here there might not be an
obvious concept jumping at you per se and you would have a wide variety of different groups of
story highlights in which case again the best thing you can do is to look at your profile
picture and build a set which complements this key piece of artwork on your profile here you can
see i have to know the leg work set up multiple artboards and style guides which leads me to my
next point work on all the designs simultaneously so you can oversee the whole creative process
all this prep of looking for examples sizing up artboards make a color palette this is all you
know it can be a lot of work but once you have all these elements in place the actual design process
will just run so much of its motor you will thank yourself later on the line as you can see i create
a layer for every step on the way one for the baseline work the skeletons as i like to call them
then i will make a layer for the background colors then the shape fill colors and so on and so on as
i said working on these icons simultaneously means that once i'm done with one rough skeleton per se
i move on to the other and then another until i have something for pretty much all of them in
my example we are making 14 different icons which is quite a lot so some of them are bound to be a
bit more complicated than the others but you know juggling with them this way just keeps me on brand
just to make sure they do relate to each other as much as they can so they feel like a proper set
okay my third point is reinforcing the previous point use copy and paste generously to make a
continuous set you not only have to make sure that you have the same line weight if your work is
linear based but every other aspect has to match as well the color the sizing the shape language i
mean literally once you get two or three of these icons done you involuntarily have created a bit of
a style guide for yourself anyway so from that one it's 100 okay to copy and paste different elements
to create the rest of the icon set copy circles rectangles sometimes hold shapes depending on what
you need i have seen great examples of highlight covers when the key art is actually the same
on all of them and the only thing that changes is the background that can work really well as
well here you can see the first icon i have made is this bowl of noodles and then later i
needed a cup of tea so i literally just copied and pasted my bowl and gave it an ear it's one
of those cases where it's totally okay to be a bit lazy the thing is when you're making a series like
these people we'll subconsciously recognize that some of the shapes are repeated again and again
which will strengthen this original vision the overarching style of your whole set as my third
and last tip i would just like to remind you that in order to really make these icons yours you
shouldn't listen to anyone who's trying to give you advice on how to design these highlight covers
no but seriously you have to make them feel like they belong to you so you have to find
a way to make them work in a unique manner only you could i'm sure some designers would
cringe if they saw that i didn't use any grits for this work whatsoever but you
know they represent a way of working that i enjoy working on also proper designers will
probably lecture you on the principle of making these icons as simple as possible
because graphic design is all about function don't try to be an artist right but if you or
your client want a bunch of these decorative lines thrown into the picture then do it don't keep it
minimal and clean and apple store like if that's not you of course there are some guidelines that
are useful to keep in mind like you should make sure that the icons look neat and readable these
are going to be tiny after all also in the very end i like to make a thousand pixel radius circle
just to see how well my icons are going to fit in this format but yeah don't let that stop you
from personalizing the thing is at this point more and more people have realized the power of
these little highlight covers but a lot of these people are not designers so they are just throwing
them together using templates and presets which is fine but i believe if you want to stand out
you should always try and make something that is new and go somewhat against the grain and what's a
better way to do that than doing things your way okay my icon set is all done if you want to see
them live you can check them out on jacqueline's instagram page and i have posted most of these on
my business page as well also if you agree or disagree with my drone parallel with the idea
of instagram acting as your business card feel free to leave your opinion down in the comments
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and everything in between take care guys i'll see you this time next week bye