How to Make Blog Images that Support Your Posts

Have you thought about blogging with your students? It’s  not as hard as you think. In this post, I’m going to step you through how to create blog images to enhance your post content without taking forever to make them.

The first step is to open a new file in Powerpoint.  Once open, you need to set up your page size. For the Pinterest, you need a 2 x 3 ratio, and it’s always best to insert the image and set it to original. Square graphics work well for Pinterest and for Instagram too. To set the dimensions of the page, you click on the design tab and pull down to custom. Put in the dimensions you’d like, and then move to step #2.

Step 2-Select your background, photo, or graphic shape

For my graphic, I wanted to fill my page with a background photo, and I wanted to add text to it.  I used two steps to do that.  First, while I was on the design tab, I selected “format background”.  I chose to fill the background with a picture, and I selected the photo from my downloads folder where the photo was located. For great FREE photos, you can check out PIXABAY. Here is what that step looks like.

Once the page photo was chosen, I added a frame by clicking on insert shape and selecting the frame button. I drug the toggle from top left to bottom right to make it the same size as the outside of my page. Then, I grabbed the yellow toggle on the frame and shrunk the width of the frame. You can recolor it any color you choose. Just go to Format shape border and fill with the appropriate colors.

Step 3-Add your clip art and words as an overlay

First I added in the title box by simply inserting a text box. I set the background to white and adjusted the transparency just so my words popped some without covering the background image. One very important tip with your blog. If you have a slider or your blog template displays different sizes of images, you’ll want to keep text and graphics in the middle so that they are not cropped off.

Another very very important tip with images is to use consistent colors and fonts for branding AND watermark them with your blog name and logo. If you’re working with students, this is less important obviously, but teaching them the process is still useful if they want to add overlays such as labels or captions.

Step 4-Saving the blog image

The final step in the process is to save the image. You will go to file-save as-JPEG. PNG is also an image file, but PNG files are larger and slow down the load speed of your website.

Need just a small header and want it in a circle?

Once all of the layers are set, use
Control A (Select All) and then right click and “Save as Picture”.

That’s it. Now, open up Powerpoint and play around.  If you still can’t figure it out, you can try searching for a Youtube Tutorial.

Related Posts:

• Picmonkey…Making Pictures Pretty and Blog Posts Pop
• Blogging in the Classroom: How to Create the Perfect Blog Post

Have a great Tech Tuesday!