Design tips for visually engaging social content

With some simple tactics and tools Canva’s Angela McDougall and Facebook’s Liz Harper explain how to create effective social media content and design.

Businesses have only seconds to catch someone’s attention on social media. To be precise, they have only three seconds to establish a brand association with their content, and five seconds to deliver a key message for better results in ad recall and conversion. 

While people spend more time on their phones and online, it’s vital to create content that’s going to help your business stand out. For small business owners, it can be daunting trying to create visually engaging content, but there are simple tactics and tools available, to help them do this.

The three C’s for beautiful social media posts

The key to effective social media content and design is simplicity. For visually engaging Facebook and Instagram posts, Canva recommends thinking about the three C’s, Colour, Contrast, and Clarity.

• Colour 

Colour blocking is an easy way to catch someone’s eye, if you have a few colours associated with your brand, you can try making your brand colours prominent in your social posts. 

• Contrast 

Contrast helps organise your design and establish a hierarchy which simply shows which parts of your design are most important (and signals viewers to focus on those). But more than emphasising the focal point of your design, good use of contrast adds visual interest.

• Clarity 

Try to create content which is easy to understand at a glance. Keep things simple, avoid long bodies of text, make text large enough to read on a mobile screen, and let the visuals do all of the talking. 

Visual trends on Canva

Since the shift to remote working began, more people have been experimenting with designing their own digital content, and we’ve seen the following design trends.

• Natural and pastel colour palettes 

Pastel colour palettes are a really strong style, which are combined with analogue, handmade, natural design features to give a visually warm and aesthetically beautiful post.

• Positive and inspiring quotes

Because of the challenging year that we’ve had so far, people are looking for positivity, and businesses are using this as a way to connect with audiences.

• Designing for Stories on Facebook and Instagram

Stories are some of the most popular tools used by small businesses (more than 500 million are created on Instagram and 300 million on Facebook each day). As such, they are one of the top doc types on Canva. Stories are exciting and fun, but  for best results, keep text to a minimum and don’t overcrowd the screen. Photo Grids are a popular option to communicate more with less.

Designing beautiful content may seem out of reach, but if you follow these simple design principles, you’ll find it becomes easier and your confidence will grow. . For even more tips and tricks and design trends for Canva, you can re-watch our Q&A session to help small business owners.

Angela McDougall is Creative Lead – International Templates, at Canva and Liz Harper is Creative Agency Partner at Facebook.