How To Create a compelling Profile Picture

Your KalliKids profile picture says a lot about you and your business. It’s often the first thing a customer sees of you when searching through the KalliKids site.

It is therefore important to get right.

But if you haven’t had experience in design or count yourself as a master behind the lens of a camera you might be a bit daunted by the prospect of creating an image to act as the face of your business. Well rest easy, It’s not as hard as you’d think.We’ll help you to understand what you want your image to say about you and explore the easiest ways to achieve this.

First off lets go through the check list to follow in order create your perfect picture:

Identify the goal’s of the picture
Decide what type of image you want to use
Take a look at the best tools for the job
Edit until your happy
And finally, check your image in-situ

Identify the goal of the picture

By this I mean decide what you want your profile picture to say about you. Are you more interested in promoting a fun atmosphere over an educational one? Do you want to portray your ‘one to one’ tuition or your ‘jam packed’ classrooms?

If you’re a swimming coach specializing in teaching children how to swim, it’s not advisable to have a picture of you sitting at home with your feet up. It doesn’t tell me what you do or give me the belief that you are a professional and a trustworthy swimming teacher.

Instead you might consider having a picture of you with some of your students standing by the pool with your company logo in the background, or perhaps a picture of a happy child swimming with your logo imposed onto the picture. This would give me not only an idea as to what you do (swimming lessons) but also tells me that your tuition focuses on children and have a class full of happy students.

While you may not be a swimming coach, the theory is the same for whatever you do. Identify what you want to portray to a viewer and work to achieve that.

Decide what type of image you want to use

There are a number of options available to you when selecting an image type to use as a profile picture.

You could use a stock photo bought off the web, a photo taken from last week’s class, a graphic logo created with design software or perhaps a mix of all of the above.

If you’ve got a good camera and an attractive location, try creating your own image. It’s often cheaper than buying stock photography and you can create your own setting.

If you think photography is best left to the professionals, stock images could be for you. Try popular sites like shutterstock or gettyimages and select from thousands of professionally created images. These have the benefit of being a much higher quality image, but are often expensive and you may well find that your image appears onother competitor sites who also thought the image looked good.

Best tools for the job

The high quality technology available to you today is not only cheaper but also far easier to use than in days gone by, with the average smart phone user already having the capability of creating high-resolution images from the touch of a button.

And its not just smart phones that have leaped forward in technological advancements, camera’s and editing software has too.

Anything from underwater shots to sky-high aerial one’s are achievable without much prior experience. However it’s important not to get too carried away with the choice on offer to you. Often a simple image taken from a middle of the range camera is all you need to get your viewers engaged.

Editing your photo can be done on a number of different platforms. Most of the best editing suites that you can download to your computer do come at a price. Adobe sells popular downloadable software for photo editing. But if your looking for something cheaper there are hundreds of free online photo editing and image creating websites online. Sites like Canva or befunky let you create some fantastic images and offer you more options for customization than you will know what to do with.

Edit your photo

Once you’ve settled on something you think fits the bill, allow yourself some time to make sure it’s spec’d correctly.

Depending on your computer, you may have the availability to play around with the features of your image. Functions like the cropping tool or the color enhancer can improve your image and help it to stand out. Try and size your image to one of the following sizes: · 720px · 960px · 2048px. It’s generally recommended to upload a photo under 100KB in size to avoid any chance of the image getting compressed.

The KalliKids website supports most image types but we recommend either a Jpeg or a PNG.

Final checks

And finally, make sure that you check your photo once it’s in place. Search for your company using the KalliKids search function and see how your image looks next to others.

Does your image stand out?
Does it convey the message you want it too?
Does it look professional?
Is the image Blurry?

Be honest with yourself. If you were scrolling through the list of options, would your image grab you?