10e20 Blog

For this ‘How to…’ I am going to use a linkbait piece from PC World called 10 Cool Gadgets You Can’t Get Here-Yet. The piece tells about how often the coolest gadgets originate overseas and usually in Asia.

The information is interesting enough to hold my attention and I want to see which gadgets they selected and also find out what it is that I can’t get-yet.

However the main graphic header is obvious and could have been worked on a bit more to capture the interest of those people that may be on the fence about whether or not to read further into the piece. So lets get into how I would have used stock photos and created a more compelling graphic to try and lure some more eyeballs into the piece.

Step 1.
First what I did was find a way to incorporate the idea of the world and how these gadgets are found on the other side of it. I searched for a good stock image of a map, or in this case a globe, with some clear outlines showing Asia.

Step 2.
Then I wanted to show someone who looked sad or depressed that they are on the opposite side of where the electronics are being made. This wasn’t too hard to find this guy staring at a phone, with a search query of “reaching”.

It should look funny, like I am pushing the notion that all the good toys are so far away. It took some isolating various elements of the man, like the hands, and then transforming them with the rotate tool and scale to get the position looking right.

Step 3.
After the image of the person is put in place I wanted to add the phones and other gadgets to the opposite side. I isolated a few of the easier to trace ones and cut and pasted them onto the main image map.

I also duplicated a few of the layers to make it look like there was a lot of things there. This was meant to look like a big pile of toys, just out of reach of our person who represents the people that can’t get them.

Step 4.
Finally, I need to add the text of the title and a few finishing touches. This can be in a simple bold font and made it on top of a dark background color to make it stand out from the main image above it. An effective technique can be to highlight or draw attention to a few key words like ‘You Can’t Get Here’ or ‘Cool Gadgets’.

Overall the graphic took me some time to search for the correct stock photos to use, then isolate the various images that needed to be cut and pasted and finally to render the article title onto it. Now, I feel that the piece would grab even those people that may have been a little hesitant to spend a minute reading into the piece. showing effort on the linkbait header graphic may be perceived as the content being of greater quality than if the header graphic was simply created in a few clicks of the mouse.

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