How’d you like to create an endless supply of beautiful graphics that bring extra life to your blogs and social media?

What if, over time, you grew an extensive library of digital assets by creating professional-looking graphics that showcase your talent and present a distinct look and feel to your freelance work?

The hyper-competitive blogosphere demands more than just words to keep your viewers engaged. And who has money to waste on a graphic designer when you can do it yourself with creativity and a few apps?

Use GetStencil.

GetStencil is an easy-to-use graphic design tool for creating beautiful images faster & easier than you’ve ever imagined.

Also, combine GetStencil images with the pics you take yourself. It’s one of my favourite reasonably priced apps.

Build your library collection

With GetStencil, you’ll find over 5,000,000 stunning royalty-free public domain stock photos.

Search by keyword to narrow your results to the raw (unprocessed) images you need.

Your goal is to build a library of topic-specific photos to;

• adjust (blur, lighten, darken, colour overlay, flip, transparency),
• filter, crop
• resize to 199 preset dimensions (social, ads, headers, posts, custom)

Plus, there are 3,100,000+ Premium royalty-free icons for personal or commercial use to help you design unique logos, watermarks, buttons and any combination of icons to place within your designs.

Ibrahim and I use high-resolution iPhone Pro-Max devices to take quality shots. Then we title and keyword-tag our best in an iPhoto iCloud library>Album.

Anyone can snap selfies of unique people, places and things throughout their travels. — the key is to have a keen eye and always be on the lookout for that unique shot. And have an efficient workflow to process the thousands of pieces you’ll have over time.

Between GetStencil and our iPhoto library (any image storage system will do), we’ve grown our collection into thousands of unique shots that portray interest and inspiration for years to come. — more than enough to integrate into our writing.

We then take our favourite images and run them through an Insta Toon app for a unique effect.

Even though free stock art is commonly what most writers use, we believe, as creatives, it’s wiser to crop, filter, add text, watermark and apply other funky photo adjustments before adding art to your stories.

For example, the images Ibrahim and I use in the IbraDan Creative Medium Publication differ from the standard stock art people assign. We’re not saying their choices are wrong, just dull (respect).

Our uniquely styled images differentiate our Medium, Substack, Linkedin, and Pinterest creations.

So — hey, everyone has their preferred style….. what’s yours?

Why Ibrahim and I finalize our images through the Toon App.

For our IbraDan Creative publication, we run selected raw images through the Insta Toon app using Oil Painting, Full HD and Oslo Scene filters.

We prefer an animated effect that shifts the focus from an ordinary human selfie to render the subject a cartoon character.

Animations create unique visual engagement and make complicated things look simple. People love simplicity.

Animations seem more friendly, trustworthy, and predictable, offering the reader heightened emotional relatedness.

This styling enhances our reader’s ability to playfully visualize themself as a type of cartoon superhero within our stories.

Our Playful and Organic Style

Ibrahim and I see our work as extensions of our personalities. Our bio states:“Get candid, witty, inspired writing to explore ‘what-if’ storytelling on love, life, and creativity by a younger-older, eastern-western same-orientation couple.”

We wanted a distinct, playful look and feel on Medium, Substack and Paragraph. xyz (web3).

Our playful design style includes semi-realistic, realistic, animated, and artistic—animated elements of people, animals, or objects.

These include vibrant colours and details of fantasy.

We intend to evoke a sense of fun and informality. Playful integrates well with an organic design style.

An organic design style is a holistic, nature-inspired technique that integrates human and heavily nature-inspired elements; Smooth, rounded forms and shapes, lightweight constructions, softer contours and flowing lines.

Learn more from The Ultimate Guide to Graphic Design Styles.

Creativity matters — so have fun creating.

After slogging through countless iterations of your writing, there comes a time to grab a cold drink, shift gears and have a little visual fun scrolling through your photo library.

Here’s where the joy happens. You’ve heard a picture is worth a thousand words. So — why not add a few thousand visual words using images with special effects to enhance your overall story?

Trust your gut and enjoy compiling unique images. You’ll need 15–30 pics to find that one money shot.

Select two or three images per post. The ones that your gut says ….”yes, that’s it!”

A post about stress will have images that portray anxiety, or one on mindfulness may contain sunsets, and a lighthearted, funny story might hold goofy poses…… on and on…

If you’re a regular blogger, build an extensive library of hundreds of unique images.

Perhaps you’re a nerd like me who can spend hours ‘tinkering’ with photos — eh?

When I’m a tad ‘spent’ writing and need a change of pace, I’ll go to my iPhoto library, pour a nice cold Guinness and create to my heart’s content.

Finally, add a watermark.

As a Gig Creator, your compilations are an extension of your personality so place a discrete watermark (where’s Waldo ) in your images. You’ve worked hard creating these digital assets, so they’re worthy of intellectual copyright protection.

Your Graphic creations are as valuable as the words you write — — don’t forget that, my animated friend.

In creation…