Prettier Pinterest: 3 Ways to Brand Your Pinterest Board Covers

Have you ever seen someone’s Pinterest page and immediately thought, wow. That’s gorgeous.

Do you want to have that effect on potential customers, followers and collaborators?

Having a great Pinterest page means that you not only have to have both well-curated and original Pins, but also pay special attention to other aspects of Pinterest, like cover boards.

How Pinterest Cover Boards Can Help Your Business

• Creating and maintaining a tie-in to your brand’s image and style
• First impressions count: prospective followers (and prospective customers!) will have a much better impression of your Pinterest page
• You look more organised & professional – like an ultraboss
• LEGITNESS (The ultimate goal of every #boss)
• It’s memorable
• It’s eye-catching.

Extra bonus: It looks pretty!

Things to consider

• your current branding
• the colour palette are you using for your other activities (e.g. logo, website)
• the style are you trying to emulate (professional, creative, feminine, fun, corporate)
• your own eye for design (or hiring a designer)

How To Create Branded Pinterest Boards

You can either curate and choose existing images or create your own unique, beautifully-branded template (and a bonus way to up-level that!).

1. Using existing images

Using images you already have on your Pinterest can have beautiful effect if done right!

Steps:

1. Choose a theme and colour palette to focus on
2. Crop text and images nicely
3. Centre the text and focus of the image

Erika Madden from Olyvia does this beautifully – she uses existing blog post images, that are already branded, and adjusts them. See how all the text is relevant – the Pinterest board has a massive Pinterest on it, no words are cut off anywhere? It not just leads to a gorgeous, cohesive Pinterest brand page, but the clear headlines pique your interest and you just want to find out more!

Keep it simple, with a beautiful visual effect that fits your brand, like Wonderlass. (That branding tho <3)

Gorgeous use of a suitable, eye-catching and on-point colour palette from tiny blue orange. Notice how all the images are perfectly centered and fit the boards’ theme?

Let’s go back to the steps we talked about. All four examples have can tick these steps off: themes and colour palettes are clear, no awkward cropping happening and the cover images are all relevant to the content of the Pinterest board. Beautiful!

[tweetthis url=”http://bit.ly/1g7rmA2″]Quick tip: Level your #boss game up and create branded cover images for your Pinterest boards via[/tweetthis]

1. Choose a theme and colour palette to focus on
2. Crop & centre text and images
3. Choose relevant Pins for each board.

2. Create a Custom Branded Template for Your Pinterest Board Covers

Simple, clear and a neutral colour palette by the wonderful Julie Harris.

Bright colours and a clear, strong font from Laura James (check out her blog images; they’re fantastic.)

Notice how the colours repeat diagonally? From Maggie Patterson of Marketing Moxie.

A clever combination of creating a template and using existing images, from Nora Conrad.

You can use stock images or your own photo to clear a simple but effective template like Nora, use a colour overlay like Maggie, or create one from scratch like Julie and Laura. Use Photoshop or Canva to create your images at a size of 217 by 147 pixels.

Extra tips:

• Use your brand’s existing colour palette or pick one that will fit.
• Use clear, easy-to-read fonts
• Keep it simple

Too easy?

Let’s bring out the big guns.

Creating Themed Templates for Your Pinterest Board Covers

Use your Style Guide (or create one) as a basis for themed, branded Pinterest cover images. It’s more time- and effort-intensive (I wouldn’t recommend this unless you’ve got a great eye for design or can work with a designer) but doing this will pay off in how your followers and customers view you. Look at the examples below. What drool-worthy Pinterests!

No Pinterest branding post could be complete without mentioning Dre from the Branded Solopreneur. Look at that!

It’s so clear that Lindsay has put thought, time and effort into creating these beautiful branded templates. Notice how the themes (fonts, colours, patterned) are similar, but each brand board is still slightly different?

Need help creating your cover images?

Lindsay has an awesome step-by-step tutorial for creating brand templates for Pinterest cover images.

Your challenge:

Create your own branded cover images – whether you curate existing ones or make a template yourself, it’s up to you! Make sure to share the link to your beautiful Pinterest boards in the comments so we can all see them!