Picmonkey Free Has Gone

I have advocated Picmonkey for years. I love the fun, fresh interface, the fonts, the overlays and most of all how  kept developing and growing it until it became almost invaluable to a huge number of people who haven't had the time, money or inclination to develop skills in other major design programs.

Over the years, I've written a bunch of articles about the free features on Picmonkey - some of those posts have been shared on the Picmonkey site and one of them is my highest-viewed blog post of all time. It still get's hits, despite being an old and completely redundant way of making your avatar a circle for social media - I still get questions on the post!

Despite all my tutorials featuring only the free elements of the program, I've paid for membership on several occasions, once for a significant number of months. I was also gifted a year long membership at one point as a thank you for the tutorials that I was writing. I strongly believe in supporting independent businesses in the technology industry and I completely understand that not everything can be free.

Last week I saw the title of the announcement email and my heart sank. I knew straight away that it was likely that something was going to changing at Picmonkey and I crossed my fingers it would be something positive. I couldn't believe it when I read that as of that moment, there would be no free access at all, other than a 7 day free trial which required credit card details. This obviously cuts the majority of students and young people who have relied on Picmonkey when their parents won't splash out on design software for adding fonts, overlays and filters to their online content.

The most irritating thing about the change is that because a long, long, long time ago, I've had a free trial which then turned into a subscription to access the Royale features (which are amazing, in particular the addition of the Hub) I am now not entitled to a free trial of the incredible new features that Picmonkey has obviously spent time and money in developing that now needs recouping. I ended up using someone else's card, with permission obviously, as I had just taken on a small freelance project that required a basic graphic. I was overwhelmed with all the new Royale features, especially the Hub, which offers a way of saving the layers in your images. This is going to make it really easy for me to whip up images for my blog, which are all just a background with two white rectangles at different degrees of Fade. The text effects are pretty good too - I'm grateful to finally have drop shadow.

Picmonkey said they wanted feedback and that they were listening but they didn't respond to my several tweets asking them to reset the system so you could have another trial if you had already had one in 2013 or something - so I've done what bloggers do best and vent these issues here - but I'm anxious to make it clear I absolutely think it's worth the money and I will be continuing to subscribe. I love the interface without the ads and the addition of new overlays that can be used in millions of different ways is fab too.

I hope they listen to feedback and provide some way of showing off their brilliant features without needing a credit card.

Katy x

Create Quote Memes & Images For Instagram and Beyond!

In recent years, when I've wanted to create an image for the blog or as a background to a slide, or whatever, I've gone straight to Picmonkey and it's done the job perfectly, as well as speedily (I'm not sponsored by them, promise! In fact all my tutorials utilise the free features only, but I do upgrade my membership when I have a few pennies because the font selection is on point)

If you haven't tried it yet, do! Today I want to share my favourite way of making fun quote images for my Instagram feed. I've started trying to curate my Instagram feed a little more, and it's really paying off.

Here's a little tutorial on how I make my cosmic quote images - for more, come over to my Instagram feed ---> here

1. Find your quote - I picked one that reflected by aspiration for the year, to live more in the moment! Don't forget, if you use a quote by someone else, which many will be, it's ethical to give a little credit.

2. Head over to www.picmonkey.com and select 'Design' followed by 'Blank Canvas'

3. Choose a font, either from Picmonkey's library or one of your own. The font works better with a plenty of black space-  and write your quote in big  lettering in the centre (or, at a quirky angle!)

4. Now, you need a background. I like to use royalty-free images by NASA for a cosmic feel but you could use anything at all. Busy patterns work best. Select the little butterfly icon and then chose 'Add Your Own' - you can then select any image from your computer. It'll plonk it over the top like this:

5. Super simple - use the Overlay toolbox that pops up to select the Blend Mode 'Add' This will fill all the black space in your writing with your image. You can move it around using the little arrows to get the best placement. Then save and BAM, you have a tailored, original quote image to share.

I don't bother with this at the moment, but you could pop your name in tiny writing at the bottom and apply the same technique, if you are worried people will reshare your work and not credit you for it.

I can think of SO many uses for this snazzy trick - blog headers, infographics, cover photos...I'd love to see what you do with it so please do tag me in your images if you use my tutorial.

Keep an eye out, I'll be sharing how you can get access to, and then use, Instagram insights to boost your following and start earning money through your Instagram later in the week. Have a great day!

3 Cross Platform Promotion Ideas

One of the things I love  most about the internet is just how many different ways there are to access content about things I am interested in.

Cross promotion is all about using one platform or social network to promote another, and back again. The benefits being, if you can get fans or followers to promote you by retweeting/posting/sharing your content on more than one platform, you are instantly increasing your audience and reach.

Here are three easy ways you can cross-promote your small business, brand or product. Please don't forget to leave a comment if you found these tips useful.

I have a problem with my twitter username. When I decided to change my internet name to Katy Clouds, I was pretty confident I had found a name that noone else was using in the way I wanted to use it. I left twitter to last because it was the only one that was going to allow me to change my username rather than setting up a new account or profile.

The username I wanted was taken, so I am @katyclouds on instagram and @katy_clouds on twitter.

It doesn't matter much, and I don't think it's lost me any followers. However, it's important you are cohesive across all platforms if you are trying to build a brand.

Having the same profile picture helps, and similiar cover photos for twitter & Facebook also give a strong branded image and let potential followers coming over from one platform know that they have found the right you.

Here's an example from The Turner Brothers Facebook and Twitter pages.

You can find dimensions out for all the social networks profile images here.

(I'd be interested in linking a smaller blog here, if you have provided this information in some way on your blog or webpage, please let me know, I would prefer to support a small blogger!)

You could also use Picmonkey if you want to create your own cover photo collages or make sure your images are sized right with their templates. It's free, and possibly the best image editor available online for free at the moment,

So, you want your Instagram followers to check out your brand's Facebook page. You are putting the link in your photo descriptions and in your bio but you don't seem to be picking up many followers.

Think about it. How often do YOU bother looking at peoples bios to find their links and follow them? The internet is making us increasingly lazy, and the shorter number of clicks the better to gain followers, fact.

So I use a little tactic that has proved really successful. It involves creating an image to share your information. An image which can then be posted across ALL platforms, including instagram. I'd like to share a quick tutorial for doing this using Picmonkey (I just can't get enough, it really does rock)

1. Select a suitable image.

I'm going to use Picmonkey's collage option to create a 3 x 3 collage of images for my sharable picture. You can skip this and just use one but I want a high impact, exciting image as my backdrop and I have enough pictures stored to do this super easily.

2. Turn it into a backdrop

Chose 'Edit' at the top to convert your collage into one image and make it available for editing. You can skip making it black and white if you want. In this case, because some of the photos I chose are not full colour, I thought it would look better if they were all black and white. The option to do this is under the little wand symbol on the far left of the Edit screen.

Now we are going to put a screen over the image to make the text stand out against it.

Use the 'overlays' option to cover your whole picture in a big black square.

Then, change Colour 1 to white (in fact, it doesn't have to be white, if a pink or blue screen would work for your brand, give it a shot!) and turn the fade slider up to 50.

The result should look something like this:

3. Add info.

The aim of this image I am creating is to tell the bands growing instagram following how they can find The Turner Brothers on facebook. You could easily use the same tactic on twitter to tell followers how to find you on Pinterest, or even include multiple ways to get in contact.

And it's ready to share :) I'll be posting this on the band's instagram feed later today. This only took me ten minutes and I was writing this tutorial at the same time. Let me know if you give this idea a go.

So you've got your cohesive branding sorted and you've been creating images to share across multiple platforms. How can you keep the momentum going? 

Make sure you save everything you create to post. The image above obviously wouldn't be useful to post on twitter, but as well as instagram it could be used to promote the band on Facebook as a post on it's own and a photo comment, Pinterest, Google+....

Some other ways you could recycle content in this way to increase your content cross promotion:

• Whilst editing images, create a few variations. Change the text to promote your insta feed and use the image a few weeks later on Twitter.
• Repost/retweet previously posted content on a different social network with a cheeky "Did you see this shot of our studio/performance/merchandise yet?"
• Create a collage as an image to post using images you have already shared (a great tactic for dull weeks when you haven't got much new content to share, and creating collages takes only a few seconds in most image editing programs) Save them to use as a backdrop for future info sharing posts too, now that's multi-tasking!

DON'T FORGET:

• Spread things out. Don't post the same image on three networks in the same day. 
• Don't over saturate your followers. Most people won't want to see seven or eight posts a day of the same sort of thing.
• Make cross-promotion only 10% of your content. The industry standard is 70% lifestyle, 20% direct promotion (this would encompass the types of posts we have discussed here as well as direct links to products) and 10% promotion of similar or aligned products or brands.

Let me know if you have any questions, I hope this was helpful!

Katy x

How To Remove The White Borders on Images In Your Blogger Blog

Hey there:) The little fellow went back to school today and I am back at the computer, pimping myself out on Peopleperhour.com and generally reacquainting myself with the internet after a few weeks of flu & summer holidays.

I still get daily comments on my 'How To Make A Perfect Circle Picture' blog post. Which surprises me really as Picmonkey now have an option to use a circle shape 'cut out' that does the job a treat. Still, I love getting comments and people reading my blog so I'm not complaining in the slightest.

One of the comments I get a lot is that readers have created their circle picture and added it to their blog, but Blogger seems to have added a white shadow border to the image. This is happening because the Blogger template that you are using has a piece of code written into it that overrides any other other options you may have selected. Luckily Blogger provides a handy little widget to insert new overriding code and that is what we are going to do.

1.

From your Blogger dashboard, select the dropdown box with the little document icon for the blog you want to work on. Its the middle one here:

Select the 'Template' option.

Select 'Customise'

2.

From the five options in white writing on the left-hand side of the screen, select 'Advanced' and when the selection box comes up to the right, scroll to the bottom of the options and select 'Add CSS'

Now, a large white box will appear. This is where you can enter any CSS or HTML code that you want to override all the other code in your blog. I'm going to copy the code from my personal blog template but I feel I should add a little disclaimer here in the spirit of honestly, I didn't write this code and I can't remember where I originally got it from - it's a generic code snippet available from many locations around the web.

Simply copy the code from the box below into the box in the template editor.

.post-body img, .post-body .tr-caption-container, .Profile img, .Image img, .BlogList .item-thumbnail img { padding: none !important; border: none !important; background: none !important; -moz-box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px transparent !important; -webkit-box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px transparent !important; box-shadow: 0px 0px 0px transparent !important; } .popular-posts .item-thumbnail{float:left;} .popular-posts ul{padding-left:0px;} .popular-posts ul li {list-style-image: none;list-style-type: none;display:inline;}

3.

Click the orange 'Apply To Blog' button, then go load up a new page and check out your pictures, KA-POW! That annoying border all gone.

I was just sitting here thinking; "you know what, I should put an image as an example..." then I realised this whole page is full of example images, so I'll save some pixels and sign off there :)

Hope this helps, please do leave a comment it's really appreciated.

Making Your Avatar Fabulous With Picmonkey

Mondays are all about fresh starts :)

It's hard to stand out online, fact. There are lots of things that you can do to stand out, many more salubrious than others. Why not start off your week by changing up your online person with a fabulous avatar (you know what that is don't you? That little thumbnail that appears by your content on twitter, facebook, linkedin...etc.) I'm a huge believer that you should maintain the same image across all your social networking. Makes for a more cohesive image and people will be able to recognise you instantly if they have you on a different site. 

So, I posted a little while ago on how to make any picture perfectly round with Picmonkey. I thought it would be fun to show a few more techniques that Picmonkey has to offer to awesome up your avatar.

Super easy! I have my Facebook avatar like this, and I always get questions about it. I thought it would be a great one to start off with. Simply load up your image...

See that little pumpkin on the bottom of the left hand column? Clicking it will give you a whole bunch of fun effects and overlays. Click the pumpkin, and then scroll down to the 'Sweethearts' section. This is where you will find the 'Heart Cutouts' option. See is there at the bottom?

Click it, and your face will be framed by a heart with a spotty pink background. I changed mine to white use the sliders at the bottom left of the sreen. Use 'Color' instead of swatch. 

Save your file as a 'jpg' or you'll get a funny fuzzy edge to the heart. Here's how mine looks at the moment:

So easy right?

This is a great idea if you are branding yourself online, use your thumbnail to advertise your brand or your blog! It helps to have a shorter name. If you name is Charlene Whippersnapper you might struggle making the text visible :(

Start off with a picture that represents what you are all about. I've rounded the corners because I'm stuck in 1999 and I think it looks cute. Don't judge. The fifth icon down on the left hand bar is a little group of three shapes. That's your overlays. The first option is geometric and I use that the most! I picked a rectangle and sized it on my image. I also twisted it 90 degrees because I want the text up the side. It's super easy to experiment with positions on Picmonkey, so have a play around and see what suits your image best.

Fade it out! Make your text pop without distracting from your image by fading your text background to 50%. I use this technique all the time to add clear text to pictures that I know are going to come up small.

Next choose a font. Big, blocky fonts are obviously a better choice, as your thumbnail is going to be teeny especially on phone screens. I think Budmo Jiggler is one of my all time favourite fonts, but BASE is a great option too. I would seriously recommend a Royale membership to Picmonkey just based on the amazing font options.  I did a little swivellyness on my text, that's the little arm sticking up out of the top if you can't work it out.

Done. Great for Linkedin and Google+ in my opinion :)

Selective colour is one of my favourite effects when used right :)

Start with a full colour image. Load it up into Picmonkey.

The second little icon down on the left hand navigation bar is a little vial of bubbling liquid. That's where you will find the effects. Black and white is a free one.

Next to the 'Fade' slider you'll see a little paintbrush. It's this that you can use to remove the black and white filter on the sections that you want You can adjust the size and density of your eraser brush too. It makes for a fun effect on an avatar.

I hope you have enjoyed these three techniques to make your thumbnail picture fabulous! Don't be shy about leaving a comment :)

Yes, I know. I made a deal about posting pictures of myself online and here is a post full of pictures of me, I'm nothing if not inconsistant eh?

I have not used any of Picmonkey's Royale effects in these suggestions. However I do have a Royale account courtsey of the wonderful people at Picmonkey.

Add A Handwritten Signature To Your Blog Posts With Picmonkey

A handwritten signature adds an extra pop of personality to your blog posts. I used Picmonkey to create the perfect little snippet for the end of my posts. Here how I did it :-) 

                               

All of these steps can be done without a premium membership, but I highly recommend you grab one, they are so cheap and worth it for the extra effects and fonts you get to play with. 

Start by filling a white piece of paper with your signature. Try adding little florishes or doodles. I made my 'y' a little loopier and tried out a cute heart. I would strongly recommend against using the signature that you use on paperwork - make it different.

Scan your page in. You can use a scanner at your local library if you don't have one at home!

Open up your image in Picmonkey. Choose your favourite version of the signature. Don't forget there are lots of tools to help you perfect this step. If like me, you write on a slant, there is a 'Straighten' tool under the 'Rotate' option.

See in the bottom corner there is a little scale slider? Make sure that is at 100%. It might look huge depending on the scanner settings, but you can adjust the size later.

Select the crop tool and use it to section off the area that you want to use. I would crop it as close to the actual writing as you can without chopping any off. Save as a .JPG.

Open up a new image. If you don't know how to make a blank image I described a simple way here. Select 'Overlays'. We are going to use the Use Your Own feature to adjust our signature. Click the button marked 'Your Own'. Select your saved signature file.

This is where Picmonkey really comes into it's own. You can now manipulate the overlay in any way that you want. You can chance the colour using the selector in the Overlay toolbox, make it as big or as small as you like.

Make sure your zoom slider is set to 100% so that you can see a realistic view of what your signature will look like on the page. I went for a simple grey colour :-)

Crop the image right down again once you are happy with the design. Save as a .JPG.

Now, all you need to do is add your signature to your blog posts. There are two ways. You can click the link below for your blogging platform and follow the instructions. Or you can simply manually add the image to each post that you do.

Blogger

Wordpress

Typepad

Let me know if you found this tutorial helpful, or if you have any questions, I'd be more than happy to help.