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Photo: Getty Images

Create Graphics For Free With This Site

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After a couple of months with the kids at home full-time, many parents are looking ahead to spending the Northern Hemisphere summer with... the kids at home full-time. Depending on where you live and how strict you personally intend to be about social distancing throughout the next few months, teenagers in particular may have reached peak boredom already. It’s time for them to 1) play around with something new and creative and 2) spruce up the confines of their own bedroom walls or freshen up their social media profiles. To accomplish both, introduce them to Poster My Wall.

On Poster My Wall, users can browse graphic and video templates by theme, such as birthdays, concerts and bands, inspirational, graduation, family or sports. Or they can search by size—everything from the size of an Instagram post or a YouTube thumbnail to a poster or flyer.

I am no graphic designer by ANY means (as is about to become obvious), but in playing around with a blank template to see how things worked, I made this little graphic for Instagram in about 10 minutes:

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Graphic: Meghan Moravcik Walbert

Yeah, so you can see why I tend to gravitate toward templates, of which there are plenty. But for the more design-talented out there, you can customise your graphic from scratch. Choose the size (poster, banner, album cover, Instagram post or story, Facebook cover photo or shared image or YouTube channel cover photo, to name a few options). Then search stock images through the site, upload your own photo, choose background colours and add your text.

You can, of course, pay for a premium subscription. But unless you’re a business owner trying to utilise Poster My Wall for marketing and branding purposes, the basic, free version is probably all your family will need. You kids will mostly be using it to create their own graphics, design some social media images and maybe print out some posters to hang in their bedrooms. The teenage son of one of Lifehacker’s staff has even used it to create an image for an embroidery patch his friend is sewing for him.

Parents can also use Poster My Wall to create digital children’s birthday party invitations—or even social distancing birthday parade invitations. Most templates are free but some designers do charge a couple of dollars if you want the option to customise their template. Also note that many of the free designs will have a small “Made with PosterMyWall.com” watermark at the bottom, but it’s not too distracting from the overall design.