Creating Holiday Gift Guides and Collages for your Blog

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Whether or not you’re a blogger, I think everyone is pretty familiar with gift guides around the holiday time. Bloggers sharing their favorite items to gift for the holidays and categorizing lists depending on the recipient. I’ve created this article the assist you in creating holiday gift guides or collages for your own blog!

With my background in marketing and social media, creating these gift guides have always been super easy for me.  I’m always aware of the different free tools that are out there and available for use, so I wanted to share my knowledge with y’all and be somewhat of a help.

I’m sure there’s tons of different ways (or more complicated) on how to do this, but this way works for me and it’s super easy! I know my readers enjoy when I put lists together especially when it comes to sales and the holidays.

Step 1: Visit canva.com and set up an account

Canva is a free program that allows you to create tons of different assets/graphics. Whether it’s an invite, resume, media kit and the list goes on! This is my go to tool for creating the gift guides. There are some options for purchase within the tool but I have never bought anything (even though extra features are usually under $5).

Step 2: Select your layout

As you look around, you’ll see there are tons of different templates to choose from. For the gift guides I either use the Pinterest or blog graphic. Go ahead and select one of those unless you’re creating something else.

Step 3: Screenshots!

I always take screenshots of items I am going to feature in the gift guide. Open up various tabs and try to take screenshots of the product on a white background if possible, so everything looks clean. You’ll be able to upload these directly on canva and play around with the size and formatting.

Step 4: Create

Now for the fun part! You can see they have templates on the left side that you can customize or you can start from scratch.

Normally I choose a template I like and just use some elements of it. Like the banner or the font type, layout, etc. On the left toolbar, you have options of adding background color, text options, shapes, clip art drawings, the sky is the limit. I normally choose from the elements section and select a shape to go behind the number of each item so it stands out (circle, star, heart, etc.). Under uploads, you can upload all your screenshots you’ll be using and play around with the size and placement of the images.

If you want to add little graphics, they have tons of free ones available or some that you pay a $1 for.  Also, if you’re ever looking for FREE stock photos, unsplash is a great place to go! That’s where I found the background for the photo on this blog post.

You’re done! See- it’s super simple! Hope this helps 🙂 There are so many things to do on canva especially creating Pinterest friendly images to pin from your blog.

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to reach out!