How to Create the Best Cover Photos for Your Feather Page

Your Feather profile is your homepage for all your upcoming events and on-demand videos, and we want to make sure that the visuals of the page match your high quality content! This post focuses on the cover photo on the page: how and where to select your image and best practices for making the most out of the real estate. 

If you’ve ever heard of the Hitchcock rule, named after the famous movie director, you’ll be familiar with the concept that "The size of an object in the frame should equal its importance in the story at that moment." Keep this in mind as you select your Feather cover photo – we’ve intentionally provided a lot of screen space so you can quickly draw the attention of your audience to your brand and offerings. 

Here are our top considerations and recommendations to creating a Feather cover photo that draws your audience in. 

1. Quickly capture someone’s attention

It’s been found that the most eye-catching images fall into incorporating one of these five categories:

• Emotion: making people feel and leading them to take action
• Relevance: including something that fits with your audience’s interest
• Visuals: picking the right colors and images that accentuate your brand
• Typography: choosing easily readable font that will make your message clear
• Text: including punchy words that will lead your audience to interact

While these are helpful guidelines, we suggest picking one or two of these areas on which to focus your design. This leads us to our next point… 

2. Keep the cover photo simple 

Despite having a decent amount of space to work with, the cover photo should not be overly complicated. If you try to include as much text as possible or try too many of the ideas above, it will likely result in a messy image that distracts from your brand and confuses your audience. 

Bottom line: impact equals simplicity. Focus on driving home one point (or two, max!) via your image and communicate this as clearly as possible.

3. Choose a sleek, professional image

It goes without saying – you don’t want to dilute the quality of your brand or page by having a distorted, blurry, or awkwardly cropped image. To select a high quality image, we suggest either using a professional-looking photo (either of yourself, your product, or something related to your brand) or if you don’t have one you’d like to use, finding a high quality stock photo online. Two websites we like are Unsplash and Pexels.

‍

If you’d like to edit the photo or have more of a graphic design-type cover photo, we suggest using Canva. They offer a great selection of pre-made templates that you can customize, or you can import an image in and easily personalize it with an overlay of the name of your brand, a favourite quote, etc. 

4. Get the dimensions right 

As you design your cover photo, keep the dimensions in mind. On the desktop version of Feather, your image will display at optimal size when uploaded as a 1440 x 480 file with the focus on the center. If you have a file that needs to be resized or cropped, we recommend a website like resizeimage.net.

5. Complement your brand 

On your Feather profile, you are not only able to customize your cover photo, but also your profile photo and the background colour of your page. With these different design elements, we have seen the strongest profiles come together when the whole page is working in unison and displaying one, unified brand. This builds trust with your audience and will ensure they immediately recognises your brand. 

A piece of psychology to keep in mind here: as humans, we find it easier to connect with other people than abstract concepts or inanimate objects. So, where possible and where it makes sense, we suggest including images of a person or people in your cover photo to touch upon the human element of your events and content! 

6. Add event-specific cover photos 

You will also have the ability to upload event-specific cover photos, for when someone clicks into that event or on-demand content. This will also be the small version that will appear in the thumbnail on your profile screen – keep in mind that the middle 40% of your cover photo will be cropped to be seen in the thumbnail (like the example below). Your default profile cover photo will be used as the thumbnail if you don’t upload an event-specific image. 

Conclusion

Remember, you can always go into your Feather profile builder and edit your cover photo at any time. So feel free to get creative and test our different designs and ideas before landing on one. As long as your page is representing your personal brand, effectively communicating your offerings, and allowing you to connect with your audience, the world is your oyster! 

And, don’t forget, the cardinal rule of design: keep it simple!