It's great to see. The quality of post on Hive has risen recently as travel blogs have suddenly become rather more pleasing to the eye and whilst I'm still not going to read the whole story of someone's holiday to Timbuktu in 1987, I will still glance down the pictures and marvel at their graphic design abilities. I'm fickle and shallow like that!
I always try to remind myself of the old adage that in human life, as in the rest of nature, we rarely plateau, or stay level. We are either growing, physically and or mentally or we are dying. I'm not a fan of dying...
A lot of this is down to one program: Canva. A package designed to create wonderful, screen and print ready graphics using a fairly simple copy and paste interface but which allows you to take your presentation to the next level.
It won't suddenly transform you into a graphic designer but it sure as hell will allow you to make a half decent attempt to provide a little visual interest in your beach shots from Blackpool. This is a good thing.
Now if you're old, you might remember a Microsoft package called Microsoft Publisher which can do exactly the same thing, albeit in a less GUI based way and in the 90s, this was an excellent package for any printshop or semi-professional designer who didn't want to go the full $700 hog for Pagemaker, the de facto layout creator at the time. Publisher is still available to day but besides me who still uses it on occasion, I know of no one else who does!
My slight reservation about Canva is that although the templates and fonts are sharp and modern, it's a little generic and subsequently, it's quite easy to spot online content that has been created with its help, but that's a minor niggle. Another issue I'd find if I were a professional is that it's rather limited with text manipulation, not a problem for bloggers and casual users but for newsletters and wordy documents for print, it would be an issue but then if that were your bag, you'd probably not be using Canva anyway.
No doubt, along the way, things will be constantly improved and updated and a serious professional will still be able to use it to create totally original graphic design.
The whole point is that if we wish to sell Hive to the outside world, as a community, we all have a responsibilty, to strive for continual improvement. We all earn tangible rewards here for producing content, however good or bad it is and this content is placed in Hive's shop window for the world to see.
Content is what people see first before they see the rewards and if we as a blockchain want to be seen as primarily content driven rather than reward driven, we all have a part to play.
So my challenge is this; In your next post, use a feature of learn how to do something new to you that you've never managed to incorporate into a blog post before. Let me know in comments what you're going to do or learn or post a link to your new post! It could be learning Canva or about page layout or HTML.
No one needs to be a super artist or designer here, but as always things should be about effort and sincerity and however good or bad something is perceived as by others, the only judge you should listen to is yourself. Never forget, rewards here are very, very rarely based on 'quality' so the bottom line is that the numbers don't matter, so don't let them matter to you!
I am determined to work out how to create comments and drag photos and text left or write, I'm also going to follow some of the Canva tutorials, try to create some line break graphics and a bio and hopefully next time, produce something better than I've ever done before!
Thanks for reading and I look forward to seeing what you create!
