With the advent of the social network VKontakte, entrepreneurs began to actively launch businesses on the Internet and look for new sources of income - groups and public pages became a tool for earning money. The cover of a VKontakte group is not easy Nice picture– this is a business card for your clients. The better you package your community, the greater the chance that they will order from you and not from your competitors.
Clothing store cover designed in our graphic design studio
The cover of the VKontakte group is a small part of the required design and, if you are just trying yourself as an online businessman, this is the cheapest packaging option. Ideally, a VKontakte group or public page should contain: a catchy advertising banner (it opens the menu), a cover, a menu (navigation or wiki landing), beautifully designed products and photo album covers, as well as branded posts. All this creates the face of your business and affects how customers perceive you.
What to place on the cover of a VKontakte group:
When designing the cover of a VKontakte group, consider mobile version. If the design will be cut off too much, important points will be hidden (contacts, services, logo, etc.), you will lose some customers. From PCs and laptops, the cover is displayed in full, but from mobile devices it is cropped on the left and right by 197 px and darkened on top by 83 px.
Don't overload the band cover with information. It should be easy but informative!
Where can I order a cover design?
You can order the design of a VKontakte group cover from a designer on a freelance exchange, find an artist on social networks, or search for a web studio’s website on the Internet.
Each of these methods has its own characteristics. You will save money on the freelance exchange, but in most cases you will find a novice or student designer. Experienced, selected designers work for the web studio, but the studio will also receive its own benefits from the order. It’s easier to place an order through VKontakte groups - you immediately see the designer’s work and compare the prices of several artists.
On the service market, prices for designing a VKontakte cover range from 500 to 3,500 rubles. and it's not just like that. Beginners work cheaper, but their level is not high; studios are intermediaries and work with a markup; and successful popular designers work for themselves.
How to set the cover to a group?
In your group, in the upper right corner of the screen under the “avatar” there are three dots “…”, click on them and in the window that appears, select the “Community Management” section, in it under the information about the group you will see the inscription: “Community cover” and actions "Download" and "Delete". Add a cover and return to the main page to look at the result.
When the cover is installed, you can replace it at any time by simply hovering over it with the mouse cursor and selecting the “Load, edit or delete cover” action. You can find out more about how to put a cover in a group in our video:
Examples of our work on the design of “what was then” groups
The better designed your group is, the more attention it can attract. If we are talking about working with the commercial community, then the design should be worked out thoroughly. The fact is that the beautiful design of the VKontakte group increases trust in the community from subscribers, and also increases the conversion rate of new members joining. In the article you can find out what it is. New members equal new orders and sales. More people- that's more money.
One example of how a change in the design of a group made it possible to increase the growth of subscribers is a public page dedicated to healthy eating– vk.com/goodiet. Various recipes are published here for people who play sports and watch their diet.
Currently the community has more than 360,000 subscribers. On initial stages its development, the group’s administration did not pay much attention to the design of its site.
The community developed through the publication of juicy photographs and correct articles, as well as through advertising in other public pages. Here is an example of deliciously designed content from their group.
vk.com/goodiet – These are delicious chicken cutlets made from cabbage. Healthy diet for Sport.
The average cost per subscriber was probably 3-4 rubles. Upon reaching the first 50,000 participants, the administrators decided to change their design and ordered a cover and avatar from the designers.
Thanks to this, the percentage of conversion to subscribers has increased, and the price per participant has also decreased to 1.5 rubles.
Group registration
Before you start designing your community, you need to know what is included in the group design.
Cover
One of the main design elements. The cover creates the first impression of the band. Therefore, it is important to pay great attention to its creation.
Avatar design when creating a group
The second most important design element. In the new cover design, the avatar is almost invisible. But this does not mean that you should not bother creating it.
When you click on the ava, it opens in a new window in full size.
If you use the classic design style without a cover, then the avatar is displayed like this:
Menu design
A very useful tool for navigating the public. Very often used in commercial groups or communities that need to divide content into categories. For example, the menu is very useful in book publics.
Product cards
Used in public pages selling goods or services.
Today, 90% of groups use new format design with cover. If you also prefer this style, then pay great attention to creating a beautiful cover.
How to change the design of a VK group?
First of all, decide which elements you will change.
If you want to install a new cover, then go to the community management menu.
In the “Basic Information” window, click on the “Download” button next to the “Community Cover” section.
After the cover is installed, let's move on to adding a new avatar. To do this, hover your mouse over the avatar area and click on the download button.
Select the desired photo from your PC.
To set an image for a product card, you first need to enable them in the community settings.
To do this, go to the management section and open the “Partitions” menu.
In the menu that opens, enable the products section.
Set the image.
Optimal sizes
Cover – 1590x400 pixels.
Avatar – 200x200 pixels.
Menu banner – 510x510 pixels.
The image for the product card is 834x 834 pixels.
Ready-made cover and avatar templates for designing VKontakte groups
If you don’t want to spend time creating a design and money on a designer, then you can download templates for the new design of VKontakte groups in psd format.
Let's look at the 5 most popular sites where you can find templates:
- FreePSD. Public VK, the author of which posts group design templates for free download. Here you can download psd sources for most popular topics and change them to suit your style.
- You –PS.ru. A site where free templates for covers, avatars and menus for VKontakte are posted. Also, here you can find detailed lessons on working with sources in Photoshop.
- Erohovec.ru. Big choice templates for the new VKontakte design for most popular topics.
- All –For –Vkontakte. The site provides a huge selection of images for menus, avatars and banners.
- Freepsd templates. Another public page on VKontakte, where templates for covers, banners, avatars and posts are published on a regular basis.
Editing templates
After the design templates have been downloaded, you need to understand how to edit them. For this we need Photoshop, because it works with the psd format.
Launch Photoshop, open the "File" menu and select "Open".
Open the desired source from your computer.
Since we are using a template, all we need to change are the text elements.
To do this, select the tool with the “T” icon and click on any of the text elements.
Enter your text.
An example of creating a banner.
After you have completely completed editing, save the result in png or jpg format.
To do this, open the “File” menu and click on “Save As...”.
In the window that opens, change the file type from psd to the one you need.
Possible problems
You may have difficulties while creating the design, so you need to consider possible problems when working with group design.
Poor image quality
A very common problem is when, when creating an avatar or cover, users use low-resolution images and stretch them to optimal sizes. Try to use photos with a resolution of 1280x 720 pixels or higher as your main background photo.
Lack of ideas
If you don’t know exactly how best to design a community, then look at a few examples of competitors. Try to get inspired and find interesting design solutions. The main thing is not to copy all their elements, because any design must be unique.
Bottom line
As a result, it is worth noting that the design of a VK group is the most important part of promotion. A beautiful design can increase entry conversions and also increase the trust of subscribers.
To create a high-quality cover, avatar or menu, you don’t have to seek help from a professional designer; you can always use free templates.
Pictures in SMM make all the difference. If not everything, then a lot. Do you want your band cover to be eye-catching without looking artisanal?
Registration in the service
Format selection
Canva comes pre-loaded with the right image formats for different social networks - from covers to posts. You can also set your own layout size, but you cannot change the dimensions of an already created layout in the free version.
Since Canva is a foreign service, it has not yet fully adapted to the Russian audience. Therefore, you can find a ready-made layout for the VKontakte cover in a special section, and not in “Create a design”. The layout we need is 1590x400 pixels - twice the actual size of the cover to achieve best quality displaying the picture (VKontakte experts themselves recommend doubling the proportions). 
On the left you will see a number of ready-made layouts developed by professional designers - they can be used as blanks so as not to start creating a design from scratch. Any element of the template can be changed, so when choosing, do not get hung up on the original color palette and fonts. You can customize the color, text, number of elements and their location in the image yourself. However, choose a style that better reflects the idea of your group: with a photo in the background, a solid background, a photo collage, a simple pattern, and so on. For our example, we will choose a template without ready-made elements, which is a “grid” for a collage. 
Loading your own elements
Before you start editing, upload your own logo or photos that you would like to use into the editor. Go to the "My" tab and select necessary files from the computer. It is advisable to upload a logo with a transparent background. It's even better if you have options for dark and light backgrounds (like a black and white logo option) so it can be used in any illustration. 
To insert a downloaded image into a new layout, simply drag it to the right and place it in the desired part of the grid. Here the photo can be “cropped” - that is, placed inside the selected window in the desired way and at the desired scale. 
Filling the layout with content
If you're working with a pre-made layout, you'll need to edit it to make the cover unique and reflect your brand's style. Editing is carried out intuitively - you need to right-click the desired element (for example, a background or a text block) and all available settings will appear in the top panel of the editor - color palette, font menu, and so on. What exactly can you change in your cover design?
- Background color (both solid fill and various textures and patterns are available);
- Text, font, font size and color;
- The arrangement of elements (can be changed by simply “dragging” the selected elements across the canvas);
- Number of elements (unnecessary parts can be removed, and the necessary ones, on the contrary, can be inserted into the layout in any quantity).
In our example, we filled four photo fields, except the central one, with frames and applied the same photo filter to all of them to bring the photos to a “single denominator” - this way they will look better together. 
As for additional details, for example, drawings, shapes or icons, some of them are available in the “Elements” menu on the left (in our example, we replaced the central photo with a solid background to insert the name of the store). And some can be found using keywords in the built-in catalog of clipart and stock photos. For example, you don’t have enough pictures of yourself for a travel-themed photo collage. Enter the word “travel” into the search bar and you will get a whole set of dozens of photographs or drawings on the topic of tourism (some of them are free, others are available for $1). 
Working with text
Through the “Text” tab, you can add a text element or a ready-made block with a combination of several fonts to the layout. You need to keep in mind that the set of fonts for the Russian language is significantly smaller than for the Latin alphabet, but, nevertheless, there is plenty to choose from. 
Here in the top panel you can change the size, color, centering, transparency of the text, line and letter spacing.
Download the finished cover for the group
When the design is ready, click “Download”, it is located in the upper right corner, and select the desired format. PNG or JPG are suitable for uploading to the VKontakte group. In other cases, for example, when creating a postcard, booklet or flyer, the printing of which you are going to order from a printing house, you need to select “PDF for printing”. 
Uploading the cover to the group
Designing a VKontakte group is not as intuitive as we would like. To download your cover, you need to go to the “Community Management” menu - the download link is in the “Basic Information” block. 
You can upload the cover to the VKontakte group through the "Community Management" section
Bottom line
Most Canva layouts are designed in a more or less minimalist style for a reason.
Firstly, these are the trends of modern web design - interfaces of websites, applications, design of brand channels, as a rule, are done using a limited set of colors to maintain the emphasis on the most important thing.
Secondly, simple images are easier to perceive on small screens mobile devices, which make up an increasingly large share of the traffic of most companies and web projects.
Therefore, when creating a cover for a page on a social network or YouTube channel, you should not “overload” it with additional details. Take a design sample as a basis and make it “yours”, while maintaining simplicity of perception. And a positive response from subscribers to high-quality graphics that clearly convey the necessary information will not be long in coming.
Here are a couple more VKontakte covers that we made using Canva layouts:
Using the same principle, you can create a cover for pages in other in social networks or images for their content. And you don't need a designer.
Regional service manager Oleg Burkov told and showed how to work in Canva.
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Nowadays, only the laziest people don’t have VKontakte groups. But creating a group and organizing it correctly are two different things.
If you want people to be interested in you and follow you, you should take care of creating a cover for the VKontakte group. It is advisable to do this before you start driving traffic to your newly created social network page.
A trick that will help make the company’s image more complete: order a cover for a VK group and for a Facebook page of the same type. The sizes will differ, but it is better to make the design the same.
- Making the cover for a VK group attractive and informative is important for several reasons:
- This is a chance to make a first impression and get the visitor to subscribe to the page. There will be no second chance like this.
- This is an opportunity to literally in a second, using an image, create the image the company needs in the visitor’s mind. Pictures are much faster and more accurate than text.
- This is the right place to talk about the most important things. Is there a big event coming up, a major sale coming up, or a new direction opening? What is your business doing now? You can write information on the cover and convey it as quickly as possible to everyone who enters your group.
Before you start learning how to make a cover on top in a VK group, you should decide which path is closer to you:
1. Make a cover for a VKontakte group to order. The result of a good designer’s work will be excellent. But you will have to pay for quality, and you will also have to spend time and effort searching for a performer and interacting with him.
2. Figure out how to make a cover for a VKontakte group yourself. This option will probably be inferior in quality to the previous one, unless, of course, you have graphic editors at least at the advanced user level. On the other hand, it will give you new knowledge and skills and allow you to save on design.
If you choose the second path, the question arises of where to make the cover for the VK group. Welcome to Community Management. This function is in the first place in the drop-down list that opens when you click the button in the form of three dots. We've highlighted it in red:
The “Community Cover” option is the fourth item after the name, description and group type. VK offers two options: upload or delete the cover.
If you figure out on your own how to make a cover on VK in a group, you will find that the site itself tells users the answer to this question. The ideal image size for the cover is 1590×400 pixels, format – JPG, GIF or PNG.
All that's left to do is design. To do this, you can use graphic editors such as Photoshop or CorelDRAW, or you can take advantage of the capabilities of simpler online services for working with images.
One of the most popular and intuitive online image and photo editors is www.canva.com. With its help, it will be easy to understand how to make a horizontal cover in a VK group.
The service allows you to use ready-made stylish fonts and options for placing text in pictures. Some templates are available for free, but some designs will require you to pay.
When the cover is ready, upload it to the VK group - and enjoy all the benefits of a beautifully designed community.
Today we figured out how to make a cover on VK in a group, and in the next issues we’ll talk about other marketing tools that will definitely come in handy for your business.
Try your hand at the 10-day business game “Your Start”, in which you will start making money from your business, using your talents and strengths!
In it we tried to collect the most effective services, so use and implement them into your business processes.
Stay in touch!
Nowadays, only the laziest people don’t have VKontakte groups. But creating a group and organizing it correctly are two different things.
If you want people to be interested in you and follow you, you should take care of creating a cover for the VKontakte group. It is advisable to do this before you start on a newly created social network page.
A trick that will help make the company’s image more complete: order a cover for a VK group and for a Facebook page of the same type. The sizes will differ, but it is better to make the design the same.
- Making the cover for a VK group attractive and informative is important for several reasons:
- This is a chance to make a first impression and get the visitor to subscribe to the page. There will be no second chance like this.
- This is an opportunity to literally in a second, using an image, create the image the company needs in the visitor’s mind. Pictures are much faster and more accurate than text.
- This is the right place to talk about the most important things. Is there a big event coming up, a major sale coming up, or a new direction opening? What is your business doing now? You can write information on the cover and convey it as quickly as possible to everyone who enters your group.
Before you start learning how to make a cover on top in a VK group, you should decide which path is closer to you:
1. Make a cover for a VKontakte group to order. The result of a good designer’s work will be excellent. But you will have to pay for quality, and you will also have to spend time and effort searching for a performer and interacting with him.
2. Figure out how to make a cover for a VKontakte group yourself. This option will probably be inferior in quality to the previous one, unless, of course, you are proficient in graphic editors at least at the advanced user level. On the other hand, it will give you new knowledge and skills and allow you to save on design.
If you choose the second path, the question arises of where to make the cover for the VK group. Welcome to Community Management. This function is in the first place in the drop-down list that opens when you click the button in the form of three dots. We've highlighted it in red:
The “Community Cover” option is the fourth item after the name, description and group type. VK offers two options: upload or delete the cover.
If you figure out on your own how to make a cover on VK in a group, you will find that the site itself tells users the answer to this question. The ideal image size for the cover is 1590×400 pixels, format – JPG, GIF or PNG.
All that's left to do is design. To do this, you can use graphic editors such as Photoshop or CorelDRAW, or you can take advantage of the capabilities of simpler online services for working with images.
One of the most popular and intuitive online image and photo editors is www.canva.com. With its help, it will be easy to understand how to make a horizontal cover in a VK group.
The service allows you to use ready-made stylish fonts and options for placing text in pictures. Some templates are available for free, but some designs will require you to pay.
When the cover is ready, upload it to the VK group - and enjoy all the benefits of a beautifully designed community.
Today we figured out how to make a cover on VK in a group, and in the next issues we’ll talk about which will definitely be useful to your business.
in which you will start making money from your business, using your talents and strengths!
In it we tried to collect the most effective services, so use and implement them into your business processes.
Stay in touch!
