“There is only one happiness in life: to love and be loved.” ~ George Sand
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about the visuals you’ll want to create and post. Whether you’re having a Valentine’s Day sale or promotion, or you just want to keep your Instagram feed relevant with #holiday imagery, read on!
We created 15 special V-Day graphics in three different brand styles, and gathered them all here for some visual eye candy and stylish graphic design tips.
1. Feminine & Romantic
If your brand is feminine and romantic, these graphic styles are perfect for you. First we have an oh-so-pretty 9-grid mood board for inspiration. It’s easy to picture these images on a glam brand’s Instagram feed.
Vertical graphics
To go with the feminine & romantic style, we paired flirty and fun images with pinks and golds for a soft color palette. Along with classic font pairings, you can use simple design elements — like icons — to add visual interest and emphasis.
Don’t feel like your visuals have to be put into a box — have fun creating visuals that speak to ALL your followers! Valentine’s Day can simply be a celebration of love, and love for ourselves as well!
Design tip: Use clipping-masks for images to add visual snippets to your graphics in a way that doesn’t overwhelm or take over your entire design! This is especially handy when you have a text heavy graphic that needs to share important information.
Who doesn’t love a good play on words? When creating seasonal graphics think about how elements of the holiday can relate to your brand.
Design tip: Take advantage of Haute Stock’s icons in the graphics packs! They make the most adorable additions that can help break up copy in your design.
Square Graphics
Mix things up by adding GIFs and testimonials to your Instagram feed. GIFs are fun and exciting, and you can create them to fit your brand style by choosing the background image and text to match. Another great way to share the love during Valentine’s (or any time of year) is by using customer testimonials — they not only look pretty, but they offer social proof to potential clients!
P.S. Haute Stock members can download all of the GIFs (and more) in the library!
Design tip: Stationery mockup images can be used by anyone — even if you’re not a maker! This stationery photo created a feminine and unique backdrop for this member’s testimonial and added a personal, realistic touch.
2. Fun & Bold
Don’t let all our pastel vibes fool you — there are lots of fun images available in the library to help you create bold, make-a-statement graphics. If your brand is sassy (and a little bad-assy), here’s the mood board that encompasses your Valentine’s Day look:
vertical graphics
With a large canvas to design on, vertical graphics are optimal for Pinterest, blog posts, and InstaStory designs. They’re perfect for adding lots of text or just a little, depending on what you want to share with your audience. For these bold graphics, we used large block type, paired deep reds with light pinks, and layered images on top of each other to create a unique visual perspective.
Cohesiveness, Cohesiveness, Cohesiveness! Make sure images that you choose for your design match the message you are trying to convey. Got a fun, bold and flirty message to share? Pick an image that represents the same statement. Save simpler images for subtler messages.
Design tip: If your brand is bold and fun then you can get away with bolder designs — a great way to do that is mixing images. Although it can seem daunting (hello, print-on-print clashing), it can help your design stand out!
Square graphics
Eye-catching graphics with cheeky sayings (like this fun GIF) or sales posts with interesting visual elements (block text + script font, the combination of pink and red) are sure to capture your audience’s attention.
3. Sophisticated & Modern
Clean lines, simple type faces, and minimal embellishments make for a sophisticated and modern look. Be sure to choose images that go with this vibe — photos that are close-up or without a lot of props in the background convey a crisp and clean vibe that feels polished and high-end.
vertical graphics
Black and white are used in many color palettes, but for sophisticated brands they are a staple element in the design. They can be paired with many other colors without clashing, and help designs and text to stand out.
Again, modern typefaces, white space, and simple icons or images help to create that sophisticated and clean look in graphics.
Design tip: Aligning all your text in the center of your graphic will always look put together but playing around with text alignments can help guide the viewer’s eye. With this design, your eye automatically flows diagonally from top left – center – to bottom right.
Design tip: Haute Stock’s Graphics Packs design elements can be used to create beautiful borders around text. Just mirror the same image on the opposite side of your copy and you have a perfectly symmetrical design that brings your attention to the main heading of your design.
Just like we did with the graphic for the Feminine & Romantic brand — clipping masks were used in this Instastory graphic as a cute cropping option for your images. For this brand style, it allows for more white space to exist in the design which creates a cleaner look.
square graphics
Share the love with classy graphics. Use stock photos as the background image that convey that polished, sophisticated look and pair it with type that is stylish and elegant.
Design tip: Never lose your brand in the typical aesthetic of a holiday. Think about the holiday in terms of how your brand would communicate it. This simple quote and design paired perfectly with this image in a way that is sophisticated and modern, yet it still conveys what Valentine’s represents.
There you have it — 15 Valentine’s Day graphics in 3 different design styles!
So whether your brand is feminine & romantic, fun & bold, or sophisticated & modern, there are so many exciting ways to combine stock photos, icons, patterns, overlays, and type to create graphics that will capture the heart of your audience!
If you want to create your own GIFs, watch this step-by-step video tutorial.
Feel free to get creative with your posts and sales — Valentine’s is the perfect holiday to be a little cheeky or a little cheesy, but the added flair is always welcome in just the right amount!
You can always take the design inspiration and tips from this post and relate them to your graphics all year round, with just a few tweaks to copy and images.
We hope you love these Valentine’s Day graphics ideas and we can’t wait to see what designs you come up with! Be sure to tag us @hautestockco or comment below with your creations!
We’ve used images from a variety of Haute Stock collections to create these graphics, like our Valentine’s Day Cookies, Fancy Valentine, and Pink & Red Collections.
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Images and graphics used in this blog post are for example purposes only. Feel free take in the visual eye candy as inspiration but do not repost without permission!
