Having a blog is an excellent way to create content around your area of expertise and generate search engine traffic. It's also a great way to engage and communicate with your customers. But the catch is you're competing with over 600 million other blogs online. So, what can you do to make your blog stand out from the others and reach the audience you want to reach? The first place to start is writing a copy. Compelling copy and stories is crucial. If you can also combine great copy with striking visuals and illustrations you are on to a winner.
So while time spent improving your writing skills is important, the illustrations and visual elements you include are equally important in hooking your viewer's attention and interest. The stats back this up - B2B Marketing's statistics suggest blog posts with visuals receive 94% more views than those without. So what kind of illustrations should you include? Enter Adobe Illustrator - one of the best tools for creating attention-grabbing visuals out there. In this article, we'll look at how you can use Adobe Illustrator to create graphics that make your blog aesthetically pleasing and readable. Let's get started.
Adobe Illustrator is a popular and widely used software application for making and designing visuals like graphics, logos, typography, icons and simple animations. It's an excellent tool for designing vector-based artwork to illustrate your blog. One of the best aspects of this is that becoming a successful blogger doesn't mean you have to have first-class design skills. Adobe Illustrator has a user-friendly interface - making it ideal for beginners to quickly and easily start creating graphics and illustrations. Here are some examples of how you can use Illustrator to enhance your blog:
Adobe Illustrator is the world's most popular software for creating logos. While other tools like Photoshop deal with raster images - made up of pixels or tiny dots that use colour and tone to produce the image, Illustrator lets you create vector graphics. This gives Illustrator a big advantage. Unlike raster images, you can resize vector graphics as small or large as you like, change colours easily, edit text, make it conform to a grid etc - all ideal for professional logo design.
According to Venngage, adding illustrations and graphs to blogs is becoming increasingly popular because visuals really help readers understand complex topics better. Also, these illustrations can be indexed on Google to help improve search engine rankings. Adobe Illustrator gives you the flexibility to create custom graphics for different types of blog posts. This means you don't need a career in web design or have to rely on stock images, you can create your own custom graphics to boost the readability and popularity of your blog.
Adobe Illustrator is great for creating digital signage. This could be a map, directions to your office, signs to print out, an announcement for your blog or social media accounts or even a billboard! - it's a great tool for creating beautiful custom signage from scratch. Illustrator also comes with a range of professionally designed templates that you can adapt and use in any digital or print format.
It's important that your blog has a strong visual identity. Whatever your blog aesthetics are - minimalist, fluid art, serious - you can create custom wallpapers and backgrounds by experimenting with colour, typography, textures etc to create the look you want.
Whatever look you choose, there should be some consistency in the style of the graphics and illustrations that you use. Adobe Illustrator has a template feature that saves a lot of time if you are creating graphics on a regular basis. Templates can be used for social media, blog posts, product images, website graphics - pretty much any type of communication you wish to use.
Infographics are a great way to display data and information on your blog in a way that's easy for people to understand. Complex topics are often best explained using an infographic. Infographics are also very shareable on social media and can be an extremely effective way of reaching a new audience. Illustrator is an ideal tool for creating shareable infographic content.
Creating custom social media icons can help you connect with your blog audience and reflect your brand's personality. Again, this is something that Illustrator can help with. By combining simple shapes, merging, adding, or subtracting shapes and adding colours and fonts of your choice - you can very easily create custom social media icons that speak to your audience. This how-to guide by Adobe provides some good insights into creating icons using Illustrator.
Adobe Illustrator allows you to create free-style custom illustrations that fit well with your brand and help communicate the message in your blog. There are a number of tried and tested techniques for creating illustrations for blogs and many different places to find inspiration both online and offline. If you find you are creating blog illustrations and graphics on a regular basis, you can create a portfolio of your illustrations and use this to pitch to potential clients to earn a passive income.
Good visuals and illustrations will really enhance a blog. They make it easy for your viewers and target audience to digest the content - particularly if the subject matter is a bit dry or complex. As we've seen, Adobe Illustrator is ideal for creating blog illustrations - from logos, templates, infographics and custom illustrations to social media icons. We hope this blog has provided you with some inspiration to explore this further and make your blog stand out from the crowd.
by Alex Garcia | 27 Sep 23