You all are in for a real treat today! My dear friend Chelsea has come up with an amazing (and pretty easy) tutorial on creating your own blog buttons. You all are going to be so so impressed!
But first, speaking of blog buttons...grab this baby and put it up in your sidebar if you're participating in this month's Me, Myself, and I link-up party!
Questions will be posted next Monday and the linky will go live on August 21st! Hope to see you there :)
Now let me turn it over to the fabulous and oh-so talented Chelsea...
Hi friends! My name is Chelsea and I am a blogger/
blog designer at
Yours Truly. Hopefully you've already learned how to install
Passionfruit Ads on your blog, because I'm here now to show you to get YOUR advertisement out there into the world of blogging. I'm here today to help you create a simple blog button with the use of a great website called
PicMonkey.
Now, if you're cringing already at the idea of doing your own "graphic design" and can't picture it not turning out totally cheesy, then you've come to the right person for help. By the end of this how-to, you will be able to create your own awesome blog button to use when sponsoring other blogs!
Step 1: Open up
PicMonkey. Click the "edit a photo" button and open up an image you'd like to use for your button.
Step 2: Click on "Crop" under Basic Edits. I recommend for starters, you make your settings the same as mine - 250 x 250 and have "scale photo" ticked (Fun geeky note: a pixel is the smallest piece of a digital image that is still controllable. A pixel is usually represented as a little tiny square, and all of these tiny squares put together equals your image. So when someone requests a 200 x 200 button from you, now you know that they're referring to 200 x 200 pixels!). Drag the box around your image (you can expand the box as well by clicking, holding and pulling on the corners) until you have the selection placed over the part of the image you want to use on your button. Click apply and your image will crop.
Step 3: Take a moment to play with some of the options under Basic Edits. "Exposure" is helpful to brighten up a dark image, and "Colors" makes the colors of your image look more natural if they are a bit off.
Step 4: On the very left sidebar, click on Effects (the little beaker with bubbles coming out of it). This is the fun and easy part where you get to play around with colors and different cool effects on your photo. Click on the name of each effect to try it, and if you like it, just click apply. Try not to get too crazy with your effects or they could end up looking cheesy. A couple of my favorites are Tranquil and Dusk.
Step 5: Now that you've made your photo all pretty, it's time for text! Click on the P on the very left sidebar for text. As a graphic designer, I find font choice a very important part to any design. Luckily, PicMonkey has some really greats fonts for you to use. A few of my favorites are Francois One, Quicksand, La Belle Aurore and Lobster Two. Take a few minutes to play around with text and see what works best for you. If you have more than one word in your blog name, I would recommend doing one text box for each word so you have the freedom to move each word around to where you want it.
Step 6: Play around with your text. If you click on text that you have already created, a little pop-up box shows up and you can change the color and fade (the see-throughness of the text) and size. I like to adjust the fade on my text to make it a little bit see through.
Step 7: When you are happy with your text, it's time to add a little pop to your button. Click on Overlays on the very left hand sidebar (all the little shapes). From here you have choices from basic shapes, hearts, arrows. I like to put one of these shapes underneath my text by placing it on top of the text, then right clicking on the shape and selecting "send to back". I then adjust the fade on the image to make it blend a bit better.
You're done! At this point, you should have created yourself a pretty decent button that you won't feel so bad about sending all over blog-land! Click save at the top of the screen, and when the pop-up comes up, change where it says .jpg to .png for best image quality.
If you need some more image sizes, simply save your current image, and then go back to the very first option on the left sidebar (Basic Edits) and choose Resize. Make sure "Keep Proportions" is ticked, and simply change the size to 200 x 200 or whatever image size you want.
**If you plan on creating heaps of button sizes, it's best to start big and make smaller and smaller images in order to not lose image quality.**
If you need anymore help with these, feel free to shoot me an email at
yours.truly.chellie@gmail.com or tweet me
@chelseaoliviaxo. I would love to see what you create as well!
Good luck, and have fun!
{This month's advertisement}
