How To Make An Etsy Banner - Tutorial

Many of us crafty people often decide to sell our wares using an online marketplace. Etsy is the most popular of these platforms so I thought I'd share a quick tutorial on how to make a custom banner for your Etsy shop.

Let's face it, when you are setting up a little business, in the early stages money is tight and you might be reluctant to pay for a graphic designer to create one for you. So here is how you can make one for free!

First up, you need a blank image. I create one by opening Microsoft Paint (yep I'm on a PC, Mac users I'm sure there is an equivalent) then I select 'save as' for the blank image. I change it to a jpeg format and save it to my desktop. Done.

Here is one I prepared earlier, feel free to right click and save it. My gift to you :)

Blank jpeg

For photo editing and image creation I use PicMonkey. Most of the features are free and it's really user friendly.

Open PicMonkey and select 'edit a photo' and upload your blank jpeg. Next you need to crop your picture to size - Etsy banners must be 760 x 100 pixels.

Once you've done your cropping the fun can begin! PicMonkey has a huge range of little pictures, banners, shapes and fonts that you can play with to create a design that suits your style and the aesthetic of your Etsy shop.

The possibilities are endless!  Once you have a design you are happy with, save it to your computer. Open Etsy and upload it using the options in "Info & Appearance" in your Etsy account.

That's it! Other alternatives are use a picture of your products (but it must be small so it will fit into the cropped area) or use a picture of something that you love that suits your style (like perhaps bright green grass or flowers) then use a text overlay. You can also use your own pictures as overlays so you can insert images of your products into the banner.

You can check out mine here - it's very simple and I've kept it connected to my blog by using the same colour scheme. My poor Etsy shop is a little neglected lately but it still ticks over and earns me some pocket money to spend on more fabric! I do really love sewing up orders for customers, wrapping them up and sending them off in the post to their new home.

Happy Etsy selling!