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Facebook® Profiles

So this segment is all about Facebook. And specifically, Facebook profiles have broken it into two segments because in the next segment we'll get more into Facebook pages and groups how they're different, how the design is different, as well as how the use of them is different. But first we had any profiles because you can't even have a page or a group unless you have a profile. So anybody who wants to be involved with Facebook has to start with profile, and I'm going to start with a Colin. This is my Facebook address. By the way, one of the things I will show you if you've never done a custom you are l for your Facebook profile or Page. I'll show you where you can go do down on Facebook. How quickly and easily you can set that up for yourself. That will be one of many tips you get out of this session. But if you want to go to facebook dot com slash Janine Warner, you can find me there. We're gonna start with a call in from a real world Facebook user Gilad Corey ski, and I'm gonna ask ...

him to say his name for me because I'm not always good at pronouncing names, and I really want to respect that. I know you're out there caught my attention on Facebook because of this profile design and I I pains me, but I have to say it was eye catching. Sorry, I just There was no better way to describe this image, right? I will ask him how he took it, and you may be quite surprised by his answer, but one of the things that he did that I want to show you real quickly. He's been really smart about showcasing different images in his profile. And I think one of the best tips for photographers, artists, designers is this profile space at the top. That cover photo that goes at the top of your profile. It's just a great place to create a gallery of images and changing that as often as once a week is not too much. If that's what you do and you want to showcase your work. One of the things that he did that not everybody figured out was that he could put larger images. Then Facebook allows, so you'll see. The official templates will tell you that it should be 851 pixels wide by three. I don't know. You could look at my template to see that recommendation. What you'll find is that, actually, that looks different on different platforms. But when you click on a profile photo like I did that cover photo, it opens up in a larger window. And if you've never noticed this, a lot of people figure this out. I can now scroll through, and you see this image is very different, really shows much smaller. If you go for that smaller design that looks like Facebook, recommend you're missing the chance to show your larger images. So as I click through, you'll see, you can actually upload images of all different sizes and dimensions to Facebook. What you need to know. What my templates will help you with is the aspect ratio should be consistent, or you're gonna have some cropping around the image, so that's a trade off. You have to decide. Do I want a crop off the top and bottom to have the full image when someone clicks on it or don't want to set the aspect ratio and make it bigger so it looks like this, and when somebody clicks on it, it's bigger. But it's the same aspect ratio. Those are the kinds of choices. But I wanted to give Gilad credit for helping me figure out that you could use big, beautiful images in your profile. Despite what Facebook says bigger is. Okay. Too many cliches for one call. Let's get him up here. Can you bring in? My wonderful caller had no good morning. Good morning. Thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing today? I'm pretty good. Really great. Busy. Wonderful. While you're you're coming in loud and clear. And I appreciate you, uh, skyping in with us from afar here in Southern California, right? Yes. I call Los Angeles home myself. So I'm rather fond of that part of the world. I thought you'd be a really great calling guest. I'm creativelive because I know that there a lot of photographers and creatives in this audience, and I think you've just done a great job of showcasing your work on Facebook. Can you just start by telling us a little bit about how you use Facebook? Are used mainly to keep in touch with the flying or prospective clients you to extend my network, but also to keep in touch with old friends. The thing is that you never know who was who and whose friends are gonna see what and keep on feeding my Facebook page with new things and especially with them working on, uh, around brings brings very interesting preparations, and every now and then, even a new client. So it's something that I definitely work for. I just people feeding that little monster Teoh. Sure that, Aziz, many people as possible to see what I do. That's great. So you found that just by putting your work out there sharing it with your friends and them sharing it with their friends, you've actually gotten clients out of Facebook? Uh, yes, yes. Even even if it wasn't directly. Huh Uh, I'm just, you know, it's like you're standing on your lil, uh, apple box and, uh, just, you know, shouting to the crowds. See, these are the things that I do, and it's not just for the lights, and it's nice to get likes, but it's more interesting to get a message that says, you know, I, uh, I was looking at your your work. I like it and I actually want my portrayed or I have a product or I have something like this. Now it's It's not like I'm just, you know, putting some pictures on Facebook, and clients are rushing in. But it's, uh it's definitely one of the tools of them using fantastic, fantastic. And you have worked in multiple countries in your life. So I imagine you have friends and connections all over the world. Facebook can be really useful for that as well. Yes, I have. I'm actually working on the project for a Finnish person right now for a finished persons. Fantastic. Yeah. So I gave you credit the beginning for helping me figure out that you could upload cover photos that are larger than the recommended space. Have you found a sweet spot? Is there a size that you think it's particularly good? You know what? I'm just, uh I'm just working with the template. And just to figure out if it's something that they want Teoh put out there even because some some picture tens of subject in some pictures, you can't really fit. You can't force something that that's wrong for this format, um, into it. And so So I just It's a matter of freeing, taking yourself and trying to feed it into the eating that, uh, template. And the thing is that not everything fits in and so I don't use with doesn't Syrian. Sometimes, you know, it looks a little off worthy trying to force in something that won't work. Um, landscapes work usually last gets worked very well, but you have. You have to keep in mind. What? What's your subject? With size of the subject in the picture and something actually better? Did you have to let recompose things into that NARAL make sense? I think Jim has a question for you, Gillian. I just just to come see that, right? Give it a little pixelated. Gonna put up. It's still but the sound will come in just perfectly sure. Sure. They're a little distracted by the pixel ization and the images. You come back, but we're gonna wrap up here. I just I was gonna ask you a couple last tips for other photographers in the audience, anything that you've done or seen other photographers do that you thought particularly worked and I would apply this to any creatives out there? Uh, first of all, you you have you own your best. I see sometimes photographers and nothing on your Facebook. Even sometimes in there, uh, galleries online, the D C. Inconsistencies. And you can have both wonderful images in 15 mediocre ones in the same in the same portfolio. It's just it's it's damaging. You better have three excellent pictures and then 25. That's really a little place and you know less. Everyone needs to needs to learn how Teoh really find their best stuff and not be another time. You're putting something out there. Lots of people are saying, Oh, this is so wonderful and really not. You have to be able to say that yourself into identified in really anything your work is. And I'm not talking about four shops. I'm talking about, like a decide determining what you're using and what you're not using it the most crucial thing you can do for your career, basically, and so that's excellent. Excellent advice that, you know, if you've got great images every week, put him up there. But don't put things up there just to put things up there. You can detract from your best work by putting up your mediocre work. Very sound advice. You know, if the text want to switch back to my computer, I have the image on the screen that I want to ask you about. I think they'll switch back over when you and I were doing the phone call to kind of prepare for this. And I know we've traded email and Facebook messages for a long time, and I've always admired this photo of this horse. When you told me how you took it, I was so amazed. I just have to ask you to share that story. A That's a good example about, uh, being ready and just, you know, having having everything ready to get the shot. It was you were about people about friends walking in a very large part here in Southern California. And, um, one of the guys had some horses and, you know, I'm walking with everything. I'm a little obsessed about the pictures, and I was I'm looking and I'm trying to find interesting subjects all the time. And I realized that, um, all the surrounding he's reflecting in one of the horses eyes, obviously. All of the horses, but they sounded like this one. And but I didn't have the right lands, and it was a bunch of a group of people that I didn't want. Teoh stop. All of a sudden, there was a little dearest is sitting on the force, and sometimes when you interfere, things are really not going the way you want. So it's It's better. Many times it's better just to have everything get rolling. And so the bunch was just going and starting to go into a more, uh like a Whitney area. And I had the wrong blends, so I had to just change change lands, and that's been running with everybody. So you find yourself sometimes running sideways with while changing elance and making sure that no best is going to go into the camera and just, you know, running around trying to get the thing. But if you're not ready and you're not aware what's going on, you need that charge. And so I was really lucky. I e. I don't really understand sometimes how I really get to capture uh, dude the good image. But it's, uh, you know, I did Well, I just think It's amazing that you were literally running as you took this picture. It looks like the horse and took a still image. The fact that both of you were moving and there was somebody on the horse that you didn't want to disturb astounds me that you captured this image so clearly and so sharply. Really awesome work. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Any last thing you want to offer. Anybody have a quick question? I really just thought he'd be a good example of a real world use and somebody who has found Facebook to be not just a place to connect with friends and family from all over the world. But you've actually gotten clients from it. So question Do you guys find that living in Los Angeles has more of a social media sort of vibe to it? And how would you answer that? Do you think so? Do you think Los Angeles has more of a social media vibe than other places you've lived? I can say that. No, not really. I mean, but you nothing geographical expert, but I think that it's just wherever you are. You know, the way Teoh get your things out there. And so if you're in Los Angeles or you're in a village in, you know, South America or Africa or wherever its way to its away to I think Jim just thinks you know, all the celebrities air in Hollywood. So we must be like, updating our fan pages all the time. The celebrities pretty much keep to themselves and the country. Help me to reach them. Fair enough. Well, thank you so much. It's really been a pleasure to connect it to you. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Thanks again. Okay. Thanks. Um, that's funny. You think that you know, the Hollywood land things should change our social media? Well, sure. No, just just just one question from the chat. So it kind of just richest. Korea's different. You know, it's funny. I ended up at lunch. I told you everything. Bolivia a couple weeks ago with these students, and I ended up at lunch, and they were like, So Hollywood. Do you have any good celebrity stories? So what? People are so kind of fascinated by it. So I did pull a celebrity story out of my hat. Just toe. Give them a little bit of a flavor, but But he's right, you know you run into them on occasion, but they're just people anyway. He's just a great photographer and has done a lot of professional work. He was being very humble in that column, and he's actually done some very notable projects as a photographer. And like I said, I think just as a user really shows how a little bit of time and a little bit of effort can pay off. So I want to move on to kind of where we left at the end of the last segment, which was thinking about images in your profiles and how you combine images and what you can dio and planning ahead and staging things could be really fun. But the fact that we have to make things work on mobile devices today is why an image like this one, unfortunately doesn't work anymore. And I've really struggled cause I love this design so much. But if you go to Sir Hans profile on Facebook, you'll see that he has long since changed it. Although he gave me permission to use this quite a while ago and repeatedly has been happy. Let me, um, feature it when I want you to take away from this image is the personality and the playfulness. He's a creative director. Hey, wanted people to kind of see that he was a creative thinker. He spent some time brainstorming with his copywriter, and then he got his copywriter to take a photo of like this, and then he flipped it upside down a photo shop. You know, putting that together in photo shop is a little bit tricky, but not that hard. And a lot of people have done designs like this over the years on Love it, Love it, love it until the Responsive Mobile designed Everything shifts around on different platforms. So this is the Facebook cover design that you'll get for free when you register for the class, and it's the one that I've used for a long time. And if you just want bigger images and you want the basic placement of your profile, it works. Fine. You'll find it on my website. I'm happy to give it away, but I have recently redesigned, and this is literally from the last couple of days. Facebook is now announcing that it's about to change the design of its pages. I don't know if that will apply to profiles, but I share this here for a couple reasons. Just when you get all excited about that perfect, wonderful design, it's about to shift on. My best advice about how to manage that is that not being quite as precise as Sharon Waas is probably the best strategy today that if you use things that work well together but also work well, when they shift around a little bit, you're gonna have better results. This is the template that I'm using now, and it's a little weird to understand these at first. But what you're looking at here is where the cut lines are on the different platforms and the big thing to look at how this profile image moves around. So on the IPhone, the profile images here and your name may wrap the two lines on the desktop. Your profile images here, and this represents where your name would be on Android. It's in a different place, so it could be a little tricky as these things move around and you'll see some screenshots to kind of help you understand this. These air designed to be guidelines, and I've got them an illustrator and photo shop, and you can set up guidelines to kind of see, but what I suggest you do now This is for Facebook Page again, saying they're not the same as the profile. So if you think you can use that profile image exactly is your it's not quite the same. The names appear differently here. The company name is different on Android than on IPhone. Here, the company name on the desktop looks like that again. I'll talk a little more about that as we get into actually changing them, but that doesn't mean you can't still be creative. So this is a wonderful design by another photographer who I've met online and traded email with many times over the years. And he's had this design for a while. Well, even on the mobile platform, it still works. So that design hold up because you see just enough of his face and his profile photo together that it still works. You can be creative. You could integrate your images, just don't integrate them. So precisely that if things shift around, they fall apart. That's kind of the big take away. Um, this is another one. Mohammad got great attention for this When he did it a couple years ago, he was in a bunch of the best of Facebook designs. In fact, he actually got a lot of attention for this. He said his Facebook fans went way up. When you come up with a creative design that gets attention, it can actually raise your profile dramatically. He's in a completely different Times owner. I might have tried to get him on the phone to talk about it because he was kind of blown away by how much attention he got for this seemingly kind of simple idea of trying to steal a wallet pop out of his own hand right? But when you kind of plan ahead and you've come up with a playful interaction, you can really do something fun. Now again, this one wouldn't quite work today cause that hands going to kind of get broken as things move. But you could still do something where you're inside the box this way and then reaching back this way and might be able to line it up so that it works on different platforms. He's updated his profile in a way that I completely respect. And if I had a photo like that one, I don't think I probably need to identify the person in that picture with him. Um, yeah. Okay, So one of the things we talked about is what do you want your profile to say about you? This obviously says he has some access to some pretty important people in the world. Anybody not know who that is? I'll show you quickly my own profile to give you a sense of how different it can look. So this is the geeky stuff that people like Andrew and Ideo we created design, and then we go OK on the desktop computer. It looks like this, But wait. When you first load it, that's what that other cut line is in the, um, template. When you first load a profile, it kind of cuts like that. And then you could expand it to see the whole thing. It used to cut much higher. Now it cuts lower. Um, so you have to decide. It used to cut the top of my head and cut off my husband's head, but not mine. And I always figured, you know, he's really tall, so he's used to having his head cut off. It used to cut more up here. Um, those kinds of things change over time on safari on IPad. It crops differently, noticed that I've lost a little bit here on safari on the IPhone, very different crop. And this is where you really see if you expect people to look at your profile on mobile devices, you have to kind of design for that variable. So I just like having a center image that would kind of stand alone even when the sides got cut off would be good enough and would be flexible enough. But you might decide that you want to make sure that that center image fits perfectly. Then you just have to be aware that on the IPhone app, it's slightly different than on safari on the IPhone. And then when you get on Android, it may be a little bit different there, too. It's close. The mobile displays tend to be pretty close, but we just can't be as precious as we used to be. When it comes to these designs, it's really one of my big messages from the day. Be playful, Be creative. Interact with your profile in your cover photo. But don't expect tow. Line them up as precisely as people have sometimes done in the past. At least not if you wanted to work on different platforms. Audience poll. I'm going to spend some time and photo shop in this class. I'm not really a photo shop instructor. There are fantastic Photoshopped instructors here. If you want to learn photo shop, this is the right place to be just not. But I will show you enough in Photoshopped to answer a question. I get a lot. How do you get three photos in your cover photo? Well, you combine them in photo shop into one, you optimize it in the right aspect ratio and you uploaded as one image. Anybody who knows Photoshopped goes Oh yeah, that's the easy thing to do. I'll show you that much in photo shop it that's not obvious and easy to you and maybe give you a couple tips. Even if you're a little more advanced, that would be helpful. But before I get into a program like Photoshopped that does cost the money. I always like to give people alternatives. So, Jim, if anybody out there wants toe, tell us what are their favorite photo editing tools, particularly if there any free tools that they love. I'm gonna let you collect those right away. So Internet room help us out. Internet chat rooms. What are the best tools for people who maybe don't have photo shop on their desktops? Anybody here in the room? You're something that you're all Photoshopped. Yeah, that's cool. Go ahead. I like me some snap seed. Snap seed. I don't know. Staff see and autopsied. Yeah, it's it's mostly for mobile. I believe it's mostly for anyone with the mobile abscess. Yeah. Used to be based on Nick. I think Nick Software okay. Had a connection to snap see part same company, I think. Who initially built it? Very cool. It's fun. It's fun. Great for Instagram Star s and a P s e d c. Very cool. So that's a mobile app. It is a mobile app. Yup. Edit photos on your IPhone or Android before you do whatever with, um, yeah, exactly. They're posting to Facebook or Adam to your instagram. There is a Photoshopped version for the IPad and the IPhone as well for those who love photo shop and shan't tell you Grab that microphone. Yeah, um I just got photo shop, so I haven't been using it yet, and I'm not very good at it yet. And I just started using light room, But before that, all I used was, um I photo super, super basic, and you can not Not their filters, but we can actually go in and do it. But pretty much all of my photos that I have on my site right now, except for maybe like 10 of them. I did in my photo because I didn't have the money or resources or whatever to get Photoshopped. So you just kind of do with what you have. Absolutely. And it's super basic, but I mean, it kind of gets you started. It's amazing what you can do with I photo. I've seen some great images come out of my photo, and I make no judgement about what tool you use. I just like to make sure that people all have tools that are acceptable to them. I will tell you once you've used photo shop, it's really hard to go. I Oh, Yeah, for sure, for sure, But it worked in the meantime, but I am definitely glad to have moved on now. Yes. Very cool. Oh, yeah, I already from appear. Sure. Oh, you just gave it away. I was just gonna say, Let's who A lot of a lot of folks are talking about gimp. Cat cat. Think it's talking about gimp around So Jim o cat think is talking about Yeah, caffeine is talking about give and pick, slur and pick slur. I just wanted to acknowledge I think internationally when I talk to people one of the most popular alternatives to photo shop because of this free and a fairly complicated image editing tool, it's very different from photo shop. If you love photo shop, you may or may not love gimp, but if you're looking for a tool that you can download for free today and start using to do design work gets a lot of attention from people. What was that other one picks word. P I X l r p I X l r no e. Okay, pick slur. We got I picky. I p I c c Why? And pick monkey from Matt Wango we've got some. One of our guests says I use a preview in Mac for really basic stuff that could be just cropping potentially CorelDraw coral paint on uh, Laura D Z W. Uses Photoshopped elements. Which, of course, we all knows light Photoshopped light and 1/4 of the price. Absolutely. Andi, I've had some great success stories with Photoshopped elements in helping members of my family who are a little intimidated by Photoshopped if you're a professional and you need to see him like a and you know you have to have Photoshopped. But if you're just doing family stuff, Photoshopped elements in some ways is the a better option for people who are not as savvy on the computers of some of the rest of us. So great, great suggestions. So again, this is just about making sure that everybody has some tool they can use out there depending, you know, irrespective of their budget and access to things. There. Lots of tools out there you can use to do the kinds of design work will do in this class is does not require a photo shop. But that's the tool that I will use cause that's the one that I have, like you can download gimp from a number of places. Um and then I just started hearing about the canvas. C A N v A Can va. It's a new online design tool. I think Guy Kawasaki is involved with it now, So that's part of why it came across my radar, so I don't know much about it, but I'll just toss that out there. C A N V A, uh, has another interesting alternative.