Business Practices in Libraryland: Creative Content
- Joy Doukas
- Jul 16, 2022
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 19, 2022
Get your creative juices flowing and build beautiful displays and engaging social media content to help your patrons feel welcomed and find what they need.
Now you're experts at Project Management and Process Management, it's time for something fun!
Let's talk about how you engage your patrons within the library and online with colorful displays and web images.
Most of you might already be familiar with the prevalent tools of graphic design, but in case you've new to design and art, here are the key players and where they excel:
Adobe Creative Cloud (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign for Graphic and Web Design) adobe.com
This is the old guard Gold Standard for graphic design, layout and video editing. Before the webification (tm) of everything most companies had to invest in this software. Back 100,000,000 years ago, when I was first in college, I spent an earthshaking $1,000 to purchase this software, and it served me well, until the devices that I was using no longer had disc drivers and they stopped supporting it. Now, like everything else, you can purchase access this amazing and versatile suite of software online for a monthly or yearly fee. If you have the money, you can find no better tool for getting all the creative business done.
....However....
Canva (Graphic and Web Design) canva.com
Man. Where has this tool been all my life. This little web based piece of software has been available since 2012, and it is a delight to use. What used to take intense training before has been made simple, and quick and easy. So, so easy. It's a great tool to make flyers, displays, and infographics and web content. They have a robust team of graphic artists and contributors that supply a stream of original, royalty free art that you can use for your designs. You can get access to the tool and basic controls for free, but to unleash the full potential of Canva, you have to pay a reasonable monthly fee. If you design as much as I do for your library, it's money well spent!
Here comes Adobe again. But, seriously... if you're editing or creating informative video, there is simply no better than Adobe. It will allow you the maximum flexibility to create your content and manipulate it any way you can imagine to create the effect you are hoping to achieve. Likewise, for apple users, iMovie, offers a pretty complete digital video editing capability.
Barring that, you can edit internally at a lot of Social Media Sites (like TikTok, Facebook and YouTube). If you are doing something simple, this might be the easiest course of action. Additionally, you can download an app to your smart phone for editing on the go, many of which are free or inexpensive to use and produce pretty amazing results.
Once you've determined what software to use to create, it's time to get started designing. What are you hoping to make? Is it a large scale image to use for a display? Or a bookmark to publicize a program or initiative?
For Spring, we began with a quote from Cicero,
designed in Canva and printed to scale using tiles.
Our tiny celeb bookmarks, highlight books
recommended by that celebrity, designed in Canva.
Having dynamic displays are a matter of staying in season, and exploring specific focuses for each month or period of time (like Black History Month in February and Banned Book Month in September.) You can find special days and what is celebrated each month HERE.
Don't be afraid of color. Using bright colors provided a cheerful and welcoming display for our patrons to explore. Also, explore size and scale. Adobe isn't constrained to size, but Canva has a 50" x 50" cap for size, which I've found to be largely sufficient.
Once you've designed your header image, it's time to pull your books and create your display. Think about displays you have seen in bookstores. Try to emulate this as much as possible with risers or other books. There's a great article about "How to Market Your Library Like a Bookstore" here.
Most of all, have fun, keep it fresh and track your checkouts. It's really motivating to see books on display circulate, and having these stats helps your management to understand the value of this type of promotion.
Next Up: Customer Service
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