2022 Product Collage Tutorial: Create a gift guide.
How to Make a Gift Guide Collage
‘Tis the season for gift guides and product recommendations! If you don’t know graphic design, you might feel overwhelmed with creating an aesthetic product collection. Don’t let a lack of photoshop experience stop you.
Here’s how you can use some basic Canva knowledge to create free, beautiful gift guides on the fly. I use these for my LTK page, but you can use them for Instagram, Pinterest, a blog, or the channel of your choosing.
Before we begin - I’d like to iterate the importance of ethics when creating gift guides. Please, please only recommend items that you’ve tried yourself and would give a stellar review.
Step 1: Sign up and take a tour of Canva.
Canva’s drag-and-drop interface is extremely intuitive - so you should be able to sign up for the free version and learn by playing around. Check out this tutorial to give you a head start:
Upgrading to a Premium subscription gives you access to higher quality images and useful features (like removing a background). I’m able to create all of these graphics without upgrading, so the choice is yours!
Step 2: Pick a theme for your items.
How will your items tie together? Regardless of where you’re posting the gift guide, a random collection won’t perform as well as a themed guide. A theme provides better hashtag opportunities, audience relatability, and higher likelihood of getting shares.
Try and pick one thing for your items to have in common - for example: unique gifts, under $30, a certain color, gifts for plant lovers, cosmetics, a brand, wood items, cozy items, etc. The options are endless.
Step 3: Shop online.
You could go out, buy a bunch of items for pictures, and return the next day. But since that will require a lot of effort and photography, you can browse around for product pictures online instead.
Keep tabs open for each product you want to include in a guide and screenshot its picture - pro tip: sticking with one e-commerce website will ensure all your products have matching backgrounds. For example, in the picture below, I created a gift guide from Uncommon Goods, which uses a beige color as the background.
Remove your background for free:
If you don’t want to stick to one website (since they have matching product backgrounds), you can remove your backgrounds with an extra step.
Use remove.bg to upload images, scrub the background with the click of a button, and download again as a fresh picture.
Step 4: Add screenshots to Canva.
Add your screenshots or PNGs to a blank tile in Canva, using the dimensions of your desired platform. Here are some examples:
Lining up images with no flair can feel boring or auto generated; you’ll need some sort of accent or unexpected pop to catch someone’s eye! Below, I used an “online only” call-out to highlight specific items. Although, you can see I used some sort of accent in all of the above examples (price tags, descriptive centered text, etc.).
Now you’re ready to post! I hope you enjoyed this quick guide to creating a product collage. I use this method to rapidly generate images for my LiketoKnowit page (and I mean quick - I can create one guide in 15 minutes).
You can follow my instagram @gift.and.style for more product collections, or @_contentland for general content tips and more Canva design inspo.
You might also like…
