Is Pinterest Inspiring Better Blog Posts?

Have you noticed a change in the look of the blog over the past two weeks, Modern Philosophers?

My pal Suzie from the Suzie Speaks Blogs inspired me to give Pinterest a shot.  I wasn’t quite sure how pinning my posts to the Pinterest boards was going to bring more people to the blog, but I had vowed to try new things in 2016 to move my writing career forward.

I read a wonderful post that Sacha Black wrote about using Canva to create cool blog graphics, and I decided that I was up for the challenge.

It did not start off well to say the least.  I’m sure I tried Suzie’s patience with all my questions, but she was very helpful.

Poor Melissa bore the brunt of it as she tried to guide me through the halls of Canva and Pinterest from her side of the ocean.  It was a very bumpy ride, but Melissa has been my biggest fan while also giving me excellent advice, which I surprisingly (for a stubborn goat like me) accepted.

This is the very first graphic I created.  I had this very clear vision of how it should look, and it ended up not at all how I wanted, Modern Philosophers.

I am a very visual person, which is obvious to anyone who has ever read one of my screenplays.  I’ve been told I should be a director because my vision of the scene is so clear on the page in my scripts.

I knew how this graphic should look, and I failed miserably.  The picture isn’t long enough.   You can’t really read the top line.  Yuck!

Things only got worse for the second post.  I went to see The Force Awakens, but instead of using cool pics from the movie, I thought it would be awesome to use a dorky photo of me.

Again, the photo isn’t long enough.  Who is going to want to pin that mess to a board on Pinterest?  Ugh!

Suzie gave me an excellent piece of advice at this point. I needed to add the name of my blog to my graphics.

I went back to the drawing board and decided to focus on creating graphics for my regular features.

I’m not happy with the Sundays With Satan look, but that’s the one post where I am confident people come for the words rather than the pictures.

I’m really proud of the Friday Night Think Tank graphic because I was able to create it from scratch by taking the picture myself.

Finally, I was able to bring my vision to life exactly as I wanted.

The lettering isn’t perfect, but I just love that photo of Doc on the hover board.

Up until this point, I had been very dependent on finding pictures online.  Now I knew that I could take my own photos and frame them how I wanted.

Then it snowed, and that led to some fun graphics.

I am such a huge fan of that pot on the porch in the severe foreground with the snowy street behind it.

It conveys everything the post is about.  The weather is crappy, so let’s stay inside and cook!

I wanted the Snow Miser one to look like the cover of a book you’d curl up to read in front of the fire.

Once I had the awesome graphics, it truly inspired me to take my writing to another level so that the story wouldn’t be a letdown.  Does that make sense, Modern Philosophers?

Einstein kicked off a somewhat serious post about bullying and growing up a nerd.

In this case, the idea for the graphic came to me first, and I figured out the post later.

I knew I wanted a photo of Albert Einstein, and then I fiddled with the filter on Canva until I came up with this blue tint that really got my brain going.

Canva is awesome, Modern Philosophers.  It’s so easy to use, and I feel like it reads my Deep Thoughts and knows what I want on the page.

Now everything was coming together.  I had been using the title of the blog post on every graphic, but on Martin Luther King, Jr Day, I finally broke out of that rut.  I had to because the title of the blog post was long and meant to provoke a response.

However, I wanted the images to say something completely different.  So for the first time, I experimented with the words that went on the photo.

The post was about how the MLK holiday was mostly forgotten in Maine.

I wanted to use the fact that it snowed that day to make an obnoxious, but important point.

I think that the graphics I created really added to the words in the post.

Pushing me to be better.

This week, I wrote two of my all-time favorite posts.  In both cases, I had an image of the graphics before I knew what I was going to write.  So that tells me Pinterest is definitely inspiring me to create better blog posts.

I knew I wanted to write a post mocking the overwhelming number of baby photos I see on my Facebook news feed.  It could have been a very simple, one joke post that I stretched out to 500 hilarious words.

However, I wanted to use a photo of Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network to take the satire to a whole new level.

The photo on the left was perfect.  That look of disdain on Jesse’s face was exactly what I wanted.  Then the words just came to me on the spot.

Once I had the photo, that led to a couple of jokes about social media, movies, and teenagers that were directly related to Jesse Eisenberg.  Those then inspired a rant about how Facebook employees feel about Mark Zuckerberg and the people who use the site.

None of those ideas were in my head until I created the graphic.  The Deep Thoughts just started flowing once the main photo for the post was locked.

Again, the Kylo Ren Oscar post was only a title when I opened up Canva to create the graphics.

Once I had these two images finalized, I had the tone and the content of the blog post bubbling in my brain.  I just let the words tumble onto the page to keep the photos company.

The Force is strong here!

Maybe I just babbled like an idiot patting himself on the back for an entire blog post, or perhaps I inspired you to give Pinterest and Canva a shot.

I truly believe that improving the blog’s visuals has improved the content of the posts.

My creative juices are flowing overtime, and I feel like I’m creating storyboards for a movie I’m going to make down the line.  That is a total rush for this screenwriter.

After all this, you totally want to follow me on Pinterest right?  I’d really like that…