Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.
My high school soccer coach would bark this at us anytime we did the right thing (soccer) but did it poorly (American soccer). The lesson holds true with your content design. Tweets with photos generate higher rates of engagement, but that’s only possible if your photos are ready for action.
The good news: Shutterstock can help by tracking exactly what’s trending in searches of its catalog of 50 million photos, vectors and videos. Shutterstock’s 2015 Creative Trend Report lets marketers in on the top global creative trends in visual aesthetic: Blurred Backgrounds, Linear and Unique Perspectives.
Blurred Backgrounds
Remember when blurred images carried a bad rap, always hiding something you couldn’t see on the local news? Today, thanks to the influence of Tumblr and Instagram, intentionally blurring a photograph can help highlight, not hide, your content. When used as a background, an artfully blurred photo can make text easier to read and bring specific design elements to life.
Famed leadership blogger Michael Hyatt accents most of his content with an attractive and shareable image. For this post’s leading image, he blurred the background, save for the baseball, and used a varsity font for the title. Not only did it add color to the blog, but the image was also repurposed for Twitter, where the story was shared over 2,000 times.