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Effective Content Marketing Graphics with Photoshop and Illustrator
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Content marketing is no longer an experimental digital marketing tool, but an integral strategy that is part of most companies’ digital marketing efforts, and the use of graphics in content marketing is becoming more important. Indeed many businesses now say content marketing has become a large part of their overall digital marketing effort. Budgets for content marketing have continued to grow, and most forecasts show that budgets for this essential marketing tool will grow further in 2016. Gartner’s research projects that content marketing will remain a key digital marketing tool for companies over the next two to five years.
One of the major associated trends experts are observing is that visuals—photos, videos, slide decks, animation, infographics, cartoons, and other visual elements—are becoming key to the success of content marketing. Recent data shows that visuals combined with digital content marketing garner significant increases in blog traffic, social media engagement, visitor-to-lead conversion rates and inbound customer acquisition results according to recent industry data. Content marketing graphics provide for more interest in stories than those that use text alone.
Photoshop and Illustrator for Content Marketing Graphics
Having the skills to work with visual elements is becoming an important part of any digital content marketer’s toolkit. Businesses both large and small will need to have employees with some Photoshop training and Illustrator training to effectively create these graphics. Adobe Illustrator is a key tool for creating charts, graphs, and infographics that add impact to any story or message being shared. Illustrator makes it possible to create customized content marketing graphics such as pie charts, bar charts, graphs, and timelines. While Photoshop can be used to customize images so that a message is enhanced by the use of unique images that lend weight to the story being shared.
The investment in learning or upgrading digital design skills provides significant returns. It keeps businesses competitive with other digital content marketers, and provides an opportunity to effectively share information visually through charts, graphs, and illustrations.
About the author
Jennifer Smith is a user experience designer, educator and author based in Boston. She has worked in the field of user experience design for more than 15 years.She has designed websites, ecommerce sites, apps, and embedded systems. Jennifer designs solutions for mobile, desktop, and iOT devices. Jennifer holds a Master of Science (MS) degree in Human Factors in Information Design.
Jennifer delivers UX training and UX consulting for large Fortune 100 companies, small start-ups, and independent software vendors.She has served as a Designer in Residence at Microsoft, assisting third-party app developers to improve their design solutions and create successful user experiences. She has been hired by Adobe and Microsoft to deliver training workshops to their staff, and has traveled to Asia, Europe, India, the Middle East, and across the U.S. to deliver courses and assist on UX design projects. She has extensive knowledge of modern UX Design, and worked closely with major tech companies to create educational material and deliver UX workshops to key partners globally. Jennifer works with a wide range of prototyping tools including XD, Sketch, Balsamiq, Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Blend for Visual Studio. She also works extensively in the fields of presentation design and visual design.
Jennifer is also an expert on Photoshop, digital image editing, and photo manipulation. Having written 10 books on Photoshop, and having consulted and provided training to major media companies and businesses around the globe.
Jennifer is the author of more than 20 books on design tools and processes, including Adobe Creative Cloud for Dummies, Adobe Creative Cloud Digital Classroom, and Photoshop Digital Classroom. She has been awarded a Microsoft MVP three times for her work with user experience design in creating apps for touch, desktop, and mobile devices. Jennifer holds the CPUX-F certification from the User Experience Qualification Board and assists others in attaining this designation in leading a UX certification course at American Graphics Institute.