Design Immediate Future

Design

It’s that time, once again, I chat to you about design and give you some (hopefully) useful tips to help your work stand out in a sea of creatives. Are you ready? Let’s go!! BE BOLD Kind of an easy one to start with, however, being bold with your choices,…

Although we’re mid-way through February already, the trends for this year still keep coming. And this time it’s colour trends from the one and only Shutterstock. Taken from data over the past year, mixed with insights from Shutterstock AI, the 2022 colour trends report details how each…

Crafting thumb-stopping social creatives is hard, but it’s even harder if your briefs are too vague, or even worse, too prescriptive. Today, we’re taking you through the do’s and don’ts of briefing for social media, with an example of how we approach briefing as well. But first! What is briefing?…

Before we begin, I need to ask you a simple yet divisive question. How much do you care about the look of your Instagram profile? The answer to this has changed over the years, being crucial in the early days where people would comment on the aesthetic of your profile…

Does your brand need to change perception through design or communicate sustainability values on social? Then keep reading this blog or watch this episode of Serious Social to discover best practices when it comes to design on social. Changing how your brand is perceived…

Ahh yes, we all love some trends, don’t we? And why not end the year with a look at some design trends for 2022 as predicted by the lovely people over at 99designs. 90’s Nostalgia: Who doesn’t love 90’s aesthetics?! With Gen Z bringing…

At immediate future, we’re constantly testing new and exciting things to help us continue breaking the social boring. Especially when it comes to design. For both client-facing employees and our official designers, Canva is a great starter tool to get creative and super easy to use! What is Canva? …

Following on from the Figma discussion a few weeks ago, where we talked about the pros of using apps like Figma in your design workflow, I wanted to take a moment to give a shout out to some other very cool apps that designers…

Trusting the process… what is it? And what does it mean for designers and social media? Earlier this year, IF’s digital designers, Ollie Farnden and Chantal El Bikai sat down to answer exactly that. We describe the process as a day-by-day series of steps, like making a cup…

Here at immediate future, we are always testing new and exciting things to help us continue breaking the social boring. Recently, the design team stumbled across a design platform called Figma. A platform that enables users to work on a single document at the same time, working seamlessly…

In light of World Mental Health Day, I wanted to take this moment to talk about creativity and mental health. We’ve all been there with burnout. So often as designers, we think of this as a normal part of the creative process. But I’m just gonna…

… to real growth A few weeks ago we talked about the importance of trusting the process and what it means to the design team here at IF. This week I want to talk a little further about some points we hit on in that specific live,…

Designers know more about ‘trusting the process’ than anyone else. Though what we all need to understand is, there is a process to everything that we do and without trust and patience, we can falter at the first hurdle. When it comes to ‘Trusting the Process’ on social media, we…

On average, users post 6,000 Tweets every second on Twitter. As a Social Media Designer, standing out from the pack is crucial, and you probably dedicate a huge amount of your time to researching competitors, trawling through Facebook design groups for inspiration, or looking at the work of…

A few weeks ago we talked about the brand refresh, in which we touched on creative reasonings and processes. In this blog, I want us to delve a little deeper into designing with social media in mind. What it entails and how best to…

Who doesn’t love a refresh? Be it a new hairdo or a colourful wardrobe? In this case, I’ll be talking about our brand refresh – a labour of love for almost 8 (yes, e i g h t) months. Taking what we already had, simplifying it, and bringing out the…

Brands, we hear your plea… you want better engagement and higher conversions, right? What’s the secret [BBQ] sauce? It’s the consumer data. In social, there are billions of consumers chatting about everything under the sun, so you just need to listen, interpret the data and use it to…

Building a relationship between you and your design team is imperative to creating social content that leaps off the screen and becomes ingrained in users’ minds. You should trust your designers to know what they are doing and keep the clients’ best interests in mind. In…

As a designer, trusting the process is second nature. We have to work on specific elements, gradually building them up slowly and methodically until we get the final product. This is something that can make or break a design team, making sure that everyone has confidence in their…

Yes, I absolutely did say that! And don’t worry farmers, this has nothing to do with you lot, I promise. After years of our photos and artwork being subjected to weird cropping, Twitter has FINALLY rolled out their new image display for mobile, and let me tell you,…

Social is a very visual medium, so why are brands still doing a bad job at communication through design? Whether it’s a boring, wallpaper image, or a message which doesn’t translate from print to social (we’re looking at you, Burger King), there’s no reason brands can’t take the…

Last week we informed you that Facebook was looking to cash in on creating a rival product to the widely popular Clubhouse. While this is true, it seems that Instagram is still trying to catch up with other social networks and enable users to have more than two participants…

In recent days, gamers have swarmed social media to show their disappointment in the launch of the highly anticipated video game, ‘Cyberpunk 2077’, some of which have been waiting over ten years for its release. To the dismay of many, the game released to platforms in an unplayable state, making…

Over the years, as social media has become the be-all and end-all of where online content is consumed, the quality and style of creative imagery have continued to advance and achieve a wide range of results. As social is an ever-evolving landscape, trends and fads come and go from…

Can you quite believe that we are a mere few weeks from the end of 2020! For many, it can’t end quick enough, but for brand marketers, we KNOW there’s never quite enough time to plan for the year ahead. We’ve just launched our Industry Benchmark…

Are you like me? Do you enjoy, nay, LOVE, Halloween season? It is by far the most enjoyable season (don’t @ me, I *will* fight you!) I absolutely love seeing the amount of creativity that goes into costumes, make up and media. I mean, even coffee get’s the spooky makeover!…

New features galore this week – join us as we go through all the tools you’ll be playing with in coming months with our Social Snapshot: Instagram has replaced Nametag Codes with QR Codes to quickly connect users Back in 2018, Instagram launched what it called ‘Nametag…

The B2B landscape is an interesting one. There’s a common misconception that B2B organisations are low on usable content, but it’s simply not true. The landscape is actually flush with more information and eye-catching, challenging content than perhaps a lot of businesses realise. What do I have right now? Think…

Last week, Facebook released a video on making creative impacts with text, timing and format. While focused largely on Facebook, the video has some general tips that are crucial for everyday social marketers looking to have their knowledge or current methods vindicated, and those that are trying to up their…

Back in March, TechCrunch reported Instagram had seen a 40% increase in traffic due to the pandemic. With everyone at home, more time is being spent on digital platforms, and all social media platforms have been nurturing their growing platform in different ways – but what about…

When it comes to conversion, the goal you might be setting doesn’t have to be a purchase – you might wish to measure conversion on increasing followers, engagement on your posts or sign-ups to an email list. Whichever conversion you’re measuring, we’ve got some top tips on what you need…

Now is a time of rapid change – which can be scary. People are inherently resistant to change because it means disruption, even if it is beneficial. Can you remember Instagram’s old logos? The days when it looked more like a rounded-edged floppy disk? When Instagram’s logo was updated in…

We’ve all likely noticed the upswing in social media traffic – but we now we have hard statistics on the massive surge happening in recent months. A look at monthly traffic, Google’s new digital skills training sessions, Facebook’s redesign and more! Media habits are changing Across all…

We take creativity seriously at Immediate Future. Not only because we’re a team comprised of artistic people, but also because it’s needed to make social work. In an industry where audiences are flooded with an endless stream of promotional messaging, your campaigns need to stand out. Creativity is no longer…

It’s a question that really puzzles me. Along with ‘why do some businesses try to mimic the market leader?’ or, ‘why do B2B companies continue to use awful stock photography of people pretending to be businesspeople?’ or, ‘why do travel companies persist with blue filters?’. At the risk of sounding…

In these times of social distancing and isolation, everyone is being affected in some way. Today, I’m exploring how coronavirus has affected artists. Many freelancers have had projects dropped but many…

Start with the ‘why’. This is [or should be] the mantra for any effective content marketing strategy. This is particularly important with social, where often the hard-sell message needs to take a backseat to genuine engagement and sensitivity when it comes to why social users are on that platform, and…

Last week, while we were discussing Instagram ethics, the internet broke the story of the social experiment of all SOCIAL experiments. A youtuber revealed that a series of Instagram posts chronicling her seemingly luxurious holiday to Bali, was intentionally staged and planted to test her followers,…

This weekend I had a genuinely delectable dining experience. The food was Persian, modern, and perfectly-portioned for a pair. The menu was small; with the heavy presence of pistachio and rose, as I anticipated. But what I couldn’t have anticipated was the polished approach to a Scandinavian-Mediterranean hybrid of pale…

At IF we love all things social. So, we’re always interested in staying up to date with the latest happenings and bringing them to you in our weekly social snapshot! Read on for a roundup of the best articles we just have to shout about… Twitter’s testing tweet…

The world of social media is a wonderfully interesting place, with new features and tests being announced nearly every day. In case you missed out on any of the announcements over the past week, we’ve rounded up the best articles all in one place! Snapchat looks to stay ahead…

Whether it’s a new platform update, testing a feature or ways to improve social strategy, we’re always fascinated to find out what’s been happening in the world of social media and learn new things. That’s why we’ve rounded up the best articles from the past week we just have to…

It doesn’t seem like long ago since Instagram announced it will be entering the world of eCommerce. And it definitely wasn’t long ago that users of the platform could create their very own AR filters. To maximise the usage of both features, Instagram is testing a…

Designers. Don’t you just hate it when you create an awesome asset to go out on social, but then you have that tedious job of having to resize it for all platforms – whilst still looking amazing!? Well, what if I told you, you may not have to…

] The world of social media is a wonderfully interesting place, with new features and tests being announced nearly every day. In case you missed out on any of the announcements over the past week, we’ve rounded up the best articles all in one place, because you know, we’re good…

It would be hard to make a secret of how far social media and technology have come in the past two decades. But let’s take a moment and look at the evolution and changes we had to go through to get where we are today. With the likes of augmented…