Yesss! It’s summer – and Gemini season! Days of going to the beach, breaking out that summer capsule wardrobe, and looking Instagram ready. What better way to spice up your summer feed with some beach design elements that make your daily scroll that much better?
Fire up Pixlr X in your browser. For this tutorial, I’m using Safari, but Chrome and Firefox work just as well. Create a new document with Instagram’s square dimensions: 1080 by 1080 pixels.
You can opt for changing the name of your project, or adding a background by clicking on the tab. I chose to go without one so I can fill in my own with a stock photo of my choice. Once your post size loads in your artboard, you’re ready to start designing.
See? No background. I didn’t need one because I planned to use a stock photo as my background, but you can add a background in any color of your preference if needed.
Next, I added a summer-themed photo from the stock photo selections available within Pixlr X. You can do the same, or add any other image you have on file. That works too.
Adding Text
Use my settings in the left sidebar as a guide. You can follow my settings exactly in order to get the hang of Pixlr X’s add text features, and then tweak to suit your own design needs afterwards. Or, you know, just experiment on your own 😉 that always works best in my opinion.
Curious how I got the orange drop shadow beneath the text? I only use this feature if my text is bright – in this case, white – and the background doesn’t really help it stand out. You’ll find the adjustment settings under Shadow.
These are my settings: I set the Blur on 34%, with the vertical and horizontal positions on 30% and 39% respectively. With the orange hue set on #F07400, I set the whole drop shadow’s opacity to 87%.
Adjusting The Photo
I wasn’t very satisfied with the dull, washed-out look of the image entirely, so I made some adjustments to the photo layer. With Vibrance set to 100%, the photo brightened up and looked more appealing to me. I raised the Saturation to about 18% (too much and it looked overly saturated, like a very bad tan session) and did nothing else. It looks fine as is now. Check it out below:
And voila! That’s basically it – a simple, quick and easy to make Instagram post in Pixlr X. Don’t forget to hit Save and download your creative works in the resolution and image file type of your preference.