How to Design Custom Pinterest Board Covers. One Easy Way to Brand Your Pinterest Boards

In order to get recognition online, you need to maintain a brand consistency across all your social media platforms. What does it mean? You should constantly use the same font and colour palette, graphic elements, logo and take pictures in similar style, every time when you’re creating graphics or take brand photos.

You can read all about branding your Pinterest profile in this post, but today, I wanted to talk more in-depth about Pinterest board covers. The quickest and the easiest way to make sure your Pinterest boards fits your brand is to design custom board covers using your brand colours, fonts and other elements like patterns or photography. In this post, I’ll show you how to design custom Pinterest board covers in Illustrator* and how to upload and add a custom board cover image on Pinterest.

Pinterest has been having layout changes a lot in this year and recently I got the newest layout and my old covers didn’t work for it anymore. If you still have an old layout, the dimension I shared in how to brand your Pinterest profile post, should work for you, but keep in mind that the bottom might get cut out. Unfortunately (because of the constant changes) there’s no FINAL and official board covers size yet, but I’ll do my best to update this post in case something changes.

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WHAT IS A BOARD COVER?

Board cover is a board image, which should be the best representation of the kinds of pins on the board. Think about it like it’s a little version of a Facebook cover for your Business page. It’s an easy way to showcase your brand on Pinterest like you should be doing on other platforms using covers.

MY BOARD COVERS ON OLD LAYOUT:

I’ve been using custom board covers since summer this year, but I needed to change them because they didn’t fit the new layout anymore. I had 12 custom board covers which you can see below:

In this layout, the board cover is square not a rectangle, so the board name gets cut off on sides. I had to redesign my covers for this layout.

HOW TO DESIGN CUSTOM PINTEREST BOARD COVERS

As you already know, I use Adobe Illustrator* for all my graphics, but you can also use other programs like Photoshop*, Gimp, Inkscape etc.  I highly recommend Illustrator*, because you can simply create one file and use it as a template for as many board covers as you want, not to mention it’s super easy to edit in case Pinterest changes their layout again.

STEP 1 – DETERMINE THE COVER SIZE

I used the Firefox Page Inspector (F12) to determine the current size for the board cover on Pinterest and it’s 200x200px

STEP 2 – DESIGN CUSTOM BOARD COVERS

Open Illustrator* and create a new 200x200px document, RGB colours, 300 dpi (we want to save images at 300dpi to increase its sizes to 833×833 because Pinterest reduces the image quality and we don’t want to have blurry board covers)

HOW I DESIGNED MY OWN BOARD COVERS IN ILLUSTRATOR*

1. On a left toolbar, click the Rectangle tool (M) and draw the 200x200px rectangle, then click Fill and choose colour # 90CDC3 in my case

2. Draw another rectangle, 200x150px, place it on top of the mint rectangle

3. Go to Window > Align and choose Vertical Distribute Center

4. Change the colour to #2F2D2A, go to Transparency and choose 10%

5. Draw another rectangle, 195x145px, place it on top of the black rectangle, change the colour to #F7F8F8, again go to Align and choose Vertical Distribute Center

6. Choose Type Tool (T) font Montserrat semi-bold for word MintSwift and regular for Design, 28px, tracking 100 and place it at X 100px and Y 100px

7. And you’re done!

HOW TO REUSE THE BOARD COVER AS A TEMPLATE

1.  Click the Artboard Tool (Shift + O) and select the board cover you’ve just created and drag it while holding alt and Shift

2.  Click on the background of the second board cover, click the Fill and change the background colour, in my case it’s #50AFBE

3.  Change the board name to MintSwift Blog posts using Montserrat regular, 25px, tracking 100 and change the colour by selecting the board cover title and using the Eyedropper Tool (I) and taking the colour from the background

4. And you’re done!

Now – repeat the steps from the tutorial above to create other board covers

HOW TO ADD A CUSTOM BOARD COVER IMAGES TO PINTEREST

1. Upload each of your covers by clicking on the + icon on the right top of the page and click Upload an image

2. Click Upload an image and choose the image you want to upload. Add link to your website in Destination URL box and click Continue

3. Add a description using keywords to the pin related to the board and pick a board

4.  Now go to your profile and Click on a board you want to change the cover for and then click the pencil icon and select Cover > Change

5. You’ll see your cover image. Click Save Changes (for some reason the board preview looks differently, but don’t worry)

6. Go back to your profile clicking your profile picture and refresh the page (F5), now you should be able to see new board cover

Repeat this process for all your boards in you want to have custom board cover

MY NEW PINTEREST BOARD COVERS:

This time, I’ve decided to create custom board covers for all my Pinterest boards (except for the group boards II’mmember of) and I added more boards: Pinterest Tips, Branding & Logo Tips, Website & SEO + Traffic Tips, Pattern Design, Print & Collateral Design and Packaging Design. Also, I rearranged my boards a little bit.

I highly encourage you to use custom Pinterest board covers. Your Pinterest profile will not only look so much better and more cohesive but also be branded which gives you a chance to let your brand shine through Pinterest. It might also increase click thoughs to your boards because pinners can actually see the board title on an image (board cover) and don’t need to read the title below, which has limited characters count (only around 27 characters are seen).

What do you think about using custom Pinterest board covers? Are you using custom board covers? Feel free to share a link to your Pinterest profile with custom board covers below, I’d love to see it!