Social Media Images – A Tribute to Lafayette, La.

Note: This post was made for educational purposes only. I am not affiliated with Lafayette Travel.

Words can’t adequately describe how shocked and horrified I was this past week over the Lafayette, La., movie theater shooting. Although I currently live in Baton Rouge, La., (which is about an hour’s drive east of Lafayette), I lived in Lafayette between 2006-2007 and again in 2011, and I still have many friends and acquaintances who live there. Of all the cities where I’ve lived, Lafayette is by far my favorite, and it was completely unthinkable that something like that would happen there. Although I didn’t know the victims personally, I do know people who knew them.

When we were asked to choose a travel industry brand for this week’s assignment, at first I thought about doing something obvious like Travelocity or Orbitz. But then I realized I could create my own little tribute to Lafayette, La., by making it the subject of my social media image campaigns. Lafayette is an amazing city with friendly people and incredible food and culture, so I attempted to encapsulate this within my images.

I began my design process by downloading the official Lafayette tourism logo from  the Lafayette Travel website. Here is what the logo looks like:

Lafayette Travel logo

It was kind of a challenge to use this logo because there was no version with a transparent background. I used the magic wand tool to cut out the logo, but of course it didn’t work perfectly. On the back end I did have to do some tedious clean up of stray while pixels.

After I cut out the logo, I searched online for images that represent Lafayette culture and cuisine. I combined these images with images of fall leaves to create autumn-themed photo collages. I played around with layer masks and opacity levels to give some of my photo collage backgrounds an orange hue. Here are the images I came up with:

Twitter cover image 1

Instagram watermark

Facebook cover image 1

Facebook cover image 2

Facebook cover image 3

If I were designing a Facebook profile image for this campaign, I would probably use the outline of the state of Louisiana with a star on it similar to what I used in my Instagram watermark. I would choose this because right now a marked map of Louisiana is a popular image on social media due to the recent tragedy.

For a Facebook ad, I would probably pick one specific industry (likely food) and focus on that aspect of Lafayette tourism. I would likely use a strong image of a seafood dish as Lafayette is well known for its seafood restaurants.

I think Pinterest would be a good social media channel for Lafayette tourism because the Lafayette Travel website includes a list of recipes. These recipe photos would work well on Pinterest. Also, I think these images could easily be adapted for use in Google Plus. Because Lafayette Travel links to many local restaurants, Google Plus would be a good place for this content. The restaurants would reap the SEO benefits from having Google Plus profiles.

In each of my images I used the Lafayette tourism logo, and I also incorporated a fall theme in some way. I also repeated the slogan, “Fall into our culture” to help solidify a fall-themed campaign.

Finally, here is my Instagram watermark in action over a painting of the Blue Dog by George Rodrigue, a famous artist who lived in the Lafayette area.

blue dog