Top 5 Art styles For Social Media For Indie and Low Budget

In this article, we look at the top 5 best art styles for graphics and animation on social media, for indie and low budget Creators!

There are hundreds or even thousands of different art styles that you can see everywhere in cartoons, animation, infographics, posters, books, comics, banners, advertisements, games, and explainer videos.  However, depending on the platform, an art style would do better compared to another. Social media is a beast by itself. Directly using art from your product, such as posters or screenshots, may or may not be effective at all in achieving the desired effect.

On social media, it's all about attention. What type of art styles are the best at grabbing eyeballs and at the same time, relatively not as tedious and expensive for the smaller creative individuals or low budget companies to produce? Here are the Top 5!

Number 5: Photobashing

This technique involves taking elements from photos and pasting them into your art. This technique is being used by many artists, from background artists to concept artists. But why is this art style great for social media?

Because of the ROI. The return on investment is always a huge factor to consider when doing art for social media either as the artwork product itself, or to showcase your work or get attention to your products. Photobashing is fast. Which means you would be able to churn out dozens of artwork to feed your twitter followers or facebook fans. It is no secret that social media algorithms favor those who "post often". Furthermore, the time and effort spent on the details would be minimal since the photos used would already have them. The only caveats are the quality of the photos used and the photobashing skills of the artist.

Number 4: Silhouettes

The silhouette art style is even simpler and faster to create. The whole artwork is basically a colored background with a black silhouette foreground. Two very good reasons why the silhouette style is good are:

• Reason one. Very good ROI. It is very simple and a quick to create silhouette art. You can just take a good public domain photo from pixabay and just draw a dark shape of the subject of your artwork!
• Reason Two. Silhouette art has very high visual prominence. Ideal to capture the attention of social media audiences!

Number 3: 3D Graphics

3D art style is not for everyone. But for those who have skills in 3D modelling and rendering, this is a great art style for social media. Blender, a good 3D program, is totally free. To save time, you can buy cheap 3D props and modify them accordingly. Regardless whether your 3D art is realistic, you can adjust the final rendered output to make it stand out by increasing the contrast!

Number 2: Thick Outlines

Cartoons, Anime, and flat art often suffer from low visual prominence. When viewed from far or a zoomed out state such as thumbnails, it is often harder for the viewer to recognize the subject of the image. There are only a few exceptions such as if a silhouette-like design is used. However, this problem can be solved by having thick outlines. This creates borders around the subject making it more noticeable. But on the downside, thick outlines create problems when drawing fine details. This style may not be suitable for every type of project. 

Number 1: Comic Style

When you look at the art style in most comics, you will immediately recognize the heavy black inking everywhere. This creates very good contrast, capturing attention quickly and enables the viewers to easily tell what is in the picture. One caveat to this style is that the comic inking style may not be suitable for casual and kids projects, with round and cute characters. Comic style art is not very hard to create. Drawing them from scratch does take some time, but it is possible to even use software to convert photos to comic art!

Conclusion

In this day and age, when social media is saturated with companies competing for attention, it is mandatory for an indie or low budget creator to create material that stands out and effectively grabs attention.  This is especially true for artists and game developers, or any kind of business that requires custom art.  Looking for the best art style is of utmost importance, as to not waste many hours of work on art that will fail to capture the necessary audience attention.  The 5 art styles mentioned above are the ones I have found to be the most effective to make your social media accounts pop out!