Design This - Custom Etsy Shop Cover Image

You may recall that I shared some changes that Etsy made to shop layouts during April in a previous blog post. Prior to the change I was approached by a fellow Texas Friends teammate asking if I would be interested in helping her design a shop cover for her shop, JackrabbitFlats, in advance of the changes going live. I was happy to oblige.

At the time there was a thread on the Etsy forums where shop owners shared their new shop covers that I had her look at. We discussed what we liked about some of them that caught our eyes, whether to incorporate her old shop banner as part of the new cover photo and more. JackrabbitFlats' shop owner sent several product photos over for me to work with. I made a rough mock up incorporating her old shop banner with representative items and sent it over as a starting point for discussion. (See above.)

Eventually she decided that she wanted a cover image that was only a collage of representative items from her shop. (Shop names are prominently displayed just below the cover images in the new layout.) I played around with various layouts and finally arrived at one that I really liked. While I had been given more items than were in that iteration, I felt adding more of them made the image too cluttered. I sent the second rough mock up to my customer and not only did she agree with my assessment but she also loved it. Now that I knew what the final layout would look like, I edited each photo for color and brightness before sending the proof for approval. (See below.) After getting approval and subsequently payment, my custom creation was uploaded and ready to grace the shop JackrabbitFlats when the new layout became live during April 2016.