Wildstory founder Marc Gutman describes the process of creating carousels, from choosing topics to deciding a color palette and font. Marc leaves no stone unturned highlighting all aspects of creation, including where to find images, template resolution, and what programs to use.
Video Transcript
Keith Roberts 0:04
One thing that I love about your Instagram is just how aesthetically good it looks. And the thing that blows me away is you create carousels so fast like you're posting at least one a day.
How do you have that exceptional level of design and content? And that speed and cadence?
Marc Gutman 0:22
Yeah, well, it wasn't always that way. You know, I wasn't born a carousel creator. I don't think any of us are we don't come out of the womb, just creating carousels. So to any of you just looking to get started know that it was a little bit of a journey. If you look at some of my early carousels, you can see the evolution. But what I do and I mentioned this before is that all the magic of the carousels and the writing so I keep a running Google Doc, it's it's always it's carousel ideas. I'm always open.
Like we're talking here, Keith and you say something that's like pithy or just makes me think I'll jot it down. And it's kind of keep this running list. And then one hour a week, I go in there. And because carousels are 10 slides, this is awesome. I just start with a number one bullet. And I'd start with like, what I think is a good headline, and I just start telling that story to 10. And then all of a sudden, sometimes I'm like, at 15. I'm like, oh, like that's not gonna work. You know what I got to start moving things around. But it's not really that hard. You have it's, it's like poetry for business, you have this constraint, that is amazing. That helps you to be efficient.
I choose topics that are either, you know, people are talking about things that come up, kind of whatever my muse is what I think people will be interested in. I do have content buckets that I try to create different content. And I did a carousel on that even. So I'll share that I was like, Okay, well, how am I organizing my content? Content buckets, Great. Let's go share that to the world and the carousel, that's a great carousel.
So things that you're doing can become great carousels. Then every carousel I layout and keynote, I'm having a renewed love affair with Apple's keynote. But you can do this in PowerPoint a lot designers use InDesign and things like that. But you can just create a square canvas. And then you start to mess around and really subtle on your typography and maybe a color palette. And so for me, you can see that's my evolution. And where I settled, was on this really cool typography this font called American typewriter, because I want people to think of me as a writer and but I have that and I was doing a lot of black and white. Now I'm experimenting with some more color palette, ie, mixing up my feet a little bit with more color, but I always want that font to be there. So people know that it's a Marc Gutman post. This is what I do. I've got my end slide with my headshots and kind of like, Hey, I'm Marc Gutman, I'm a brand guy DM me.
So that set and then I just start to lay it out, I may go to like Unsplash or Pexels. And find out an image and I'm, I love just going and using the cutout tool in Photoshop, but I am the world's worst Photoshoper. But I do that. And I've learned that I think the only thing I can do on Photoshop is quickly cut things out of images. And then I'll put it on there. You know, but I only use images when I feel like I really need to. And there I go. So I'm not afraid of having text based carousels. I lay them out. Things like I use finger swipes.
So I've got icons and things like that, that I built in my template. So I can quickly grab them and just kind of like literally modular put it all together. And I'm really focused on the message, not the design. So once you get there and you create your template, you can be cranking out carousels and then I just export those out of keynote. And either JPEG or PNG, typically at 1920 by 1920 resolution. And then and then also just an easy export of that into PDF for posting and other places like LinkedIn.
Keith Roberts 3:47
Amazing man and LinkedIn, you keep that same format, 1920 by 1920 aspect ratio?
Marc Gutman 3:53
In the PDF, yes, because what you'll see, if you go and you follow me on LinkedIn, you'll see under the post, it's just this beautiful little carousel and you thumb through that either on your phone or on your computer. It just, it works perfectly.
