Design a Social Media Post Template Using Affinity Designer on the iPad

Creating a strong social media presence is an incredibly important aspect of creative businesses today. If you are a creative business owner or have any kind of online social media presence, then you know just how important it can be to have beautiful strong and clear graphics to establish yourself on social media. What makes things a little more difficult is that each platform has their own rules as to what size your graphics need to be.  Instagram’s default is square, but they also have instagram stories which is tall and Facebook loves horizontal images and Pinterest graphics will perform best if they are taller than they are wide. The easiest way I have found to keep up with it all is to create templates for each platform and use those templates to help me plan out post themes, color schemes and content. In this months class, I am going to show you the process I use to create social media post templates in Affinity designer right on your ipad. 
Hello everyone! If this your first class with me, welcome! If you are a returning student, welcome back! I am Jen and I will be guiding you through this creative course. I’m a freelance graphic designer, illustrator and educator based out of the midwest and I run Bella + Sophia Creative studio. If you want to learn more about me, you can visit me online at: www.bellasophiacreative.com and you can check out my youtube channel: The Freelance Life. There, you will get a behind the scenes view of the work I do as a creative freelancer and educator  as well as access to a huge library of additional free tutorials relating to art, design and illustration. I am a huge advocate for sharing knowledge in accessible ways and I have found online courses and places like Youtube are great places for this and help me to connect to a diverse group of people looking to learn and grow. 
What the class is about and what you will learn
In today’s class, we are going to be learning about and designing social media templates in Affinity designer on our ipad that we can use over and over again to plan  and organize our social media content. For this course in particular we will focus on designing instagram posts in square format, but you can update the size to fit your needs. For some of you, it may make sense to create several different social media templates for each type of post you publish.  Before we jump into the technical aspects of working in the affinity designer ipad app, we will go over design tips that will help make your posts strong and keep your process streamlined. Then, we will get into the nitty gritty of creating in Affinity Designer. We will go over setting up our files, creating guidelines, the importance of working in layers, and the different tools available in the software.
I am excited to create something great with you today. Let’s get started!