Ever heard of the saying a picture is worth a thousand words? I know I’ve heard that a lot. I also know it’s easy to spend thousands of dollars on either graphic design software or on graphic designers. Sadly, we don’t all have thousands of dollars or have a cousin called Jeremy who is a graphic design genius.
Luckily, Stencil is a graphic design tool you can use directly in your browser and it doesn’t require thousands of dollars. I actually used Stencil and its templates to create all of the images in this very article. Handy!
I use Stencil to create graphics for this Blog often. I also use it to create engaging images on my email newsletter—you should sign up for that by the way—as well as on my social media accounts. Luckily there are templates for all of these instances.
The way Stencil works is quite simple. You can either start with a blank canvas and add images (including your own uploads), icons, text (using your own uploaded fonts if desired), quotes, colours, logos or watermarks. With all of those layered options, the possibilities are endless.
Let me explain how it works using images and examples. That should figuratively take this articles word-count value to the tens of thousands by the time I’m done.
For the image below, I found an existing Twitter template and edited the following elements that came with the template.
- Text (I only changed the first line)
- Icons (I changed them to guitars because guitars are cool)
- Background image (I darkened it in Stencil to allow the text to stand out more)
- Transparency of the block behind the Sign up today! text.
Once you get the hang of template altering, the sky is the limit. Here are a couple of other examples I quickly created just by editing a few elements in existing templates.
In the image above, you can see how Stencil allowed me to upload my own logo and include it in the design I edited. Brilliant. I may just use that image to help promote my email newsletter.
Another feature I love in Stencil is the Saved Images section. If you edit a template and want to reuse that as a part of your own branded suite, this section allows you to do that. Between Saved Images and the Collections section of the Templates section of Stencil, branded suites of images that you can use across social media platforms is simplified to perfection.
Oh, you can also create your social media post in Stencil and post it directly to most popular social media platforms. That’s both awesome and a time saver. It’s like some kind of time saving piece of awesomeness.
Create your brand colours, upload your logo and font/s and start creating your own branded templates to share on your website and social media channels. It’s as simple as that really. That’s what Stencil allows you to do. It’s one of the tools I use to do just that on this very website—for images just like this …
