Want to take a peek inside Envato? One of our top designers gives us the scoop on how she uses Envato Elements to create incredible content.
Everyday, people all around the world use Envato Elements to bring their creative projects to life – including our very own designers!
The huge number of items and assets available with an Envato Elements subscription mean that it can be used in a range of creative fields, and accomodate different design styles and formats. And while this opens up a world of endless creative possibilities – it can also be hard to know where to begin! So, if you’d like an insider perspective, we’re giving you a peek behind the Envato curtain.
Envato designer Camilla Anderson works with our Marketing team creating high-quality content for a variety of projects, all using Envato Elements. We caught up with Camilla to get her expert tips, advice and insight into how she uses Envato to produce everything from social videos to mockups.
What’s your role at Envato and what kinds of things do you create?
I’m a Digital Designer working within the Content Marketing team, so I get to be involved in a pretty wide variety of projects. I work on the Elements Blog, our social media accounts and our YouTube channel, as well as landing pages, the occasional report or ebook, and projects for Envato Tuts.
Before specializing in content marketing I also worked on a range of other marketing projects, including our sale campaigns and emails.
What Envato products do you use to create your work?
Day-to-day I use Envato Elements for the majority of my work, as well as photos from Twenty20 (which is part of Envato Elements). Sometimes Mixkit will have a perfect illustration for a blog article so I’ll use that instead of creating one from scratch. I also recently updated the Envato and Twenty20 Instagram ‘link in bios’ which are built with Milkshake. So quite a few!
What are your go-to Envato Elements categories?
I definitely use Graphics the most as there’s so much variety within that category, with Graphic Templates and Photos being a close joint second. However, it depends on the project and the types of visuals that will suit it best. For example, for our Instagram Trends video I used the photo Giant Inflatable Flamingos by SeeDJan from Twenty20 for the imagery and textures to reflect the trends in the article. And for the lead image in our Mockup Trends feature image above, I used a product mockup and plastic overlay, both from the Graphic Templates category.
I also love finding items in the other categories on Envato Elements that are a little different from regular stock items. I love the 3D objects as I can choose the angle an object is positioned in. I found a great microphone in that category for the imagery for our Podcast Guide.
The dancing animation used in the Hip Hop music trend post we shared on social media was a great find in Stock Videos (it featured a music track too), and I also love looking through new Fonts and finding interesting ways to use them, like we did in the Font Duo post for Friendship Day this year.
How do you combine different items and categories?
I mix and match items from Envato Elements a lot in my work, sometimes combining quite a few categories in the one piece. For the Collage trend article we published earlier this year, I was excited at the chance to have a bit of fun creating a collage for the header image that could also be animated for social media. I used a combination of two photos, along with organic shapes from an item in Graphics to create a modern-style collage.
For a recent blog article about neon effects, I didn’t want to just create a clichéd neon sign with text for the feature image. I knew I’d seen some amazing line illustrations on Envato Elements recently, so I used one with a neon Photoshop layer style to create something that, I think, looks really eye-catching.
What’s a recent project you worked on that you really enjoyed?
I really loved designing the Creative Trends 2020 report earlier this year. Before working at Envato I did a lot more print work and I have to admit that I miss it sometimes, so it was really great to be working on page layouts again, and to get back into Adobe InDesign!
Aside from reigniting my love for paragraph styles, I enjoyed playing with the layout to balance the amount of text with enough supporting imagery to have a big visual impact. As the report was created predominantly for visual people, I wanted to make sure it was something myself and other designers would want to pick up and read.
What’s the best thing about being a designer at Envato?
I’m a very strategic thinker, but I love that I have the opportunity here to be really creative when solving problems as well. Some of the work I do allows me to essentially ‘play’ and experiment with new things like Photoshop actions and video templates to create designs that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to create from scratch.
I like pairing video backgrounds with static graphics on top like in the 80s ‘True or False’ post we did earlier this year. It allows me to create scroll-stopping content that looks like it has a high production value, when it was actually quite quick and easy to create, and all within Photoshop!
Developing social media posts provides a great opportunity for me to play with Photoshop actions since actions can be used to make really easy video content. I like to create videos that either show the same image with different actions applied, or that demonstrate the action ‘building’ layer by layer on the original image, like in the bubbly ice cream post shown below.
The way this action produces the effects on different layers meant that I could tweak the end result to better suit our content, such as changing colours and adding gradients, and adding the additional larger bubbles as an overlay for the final touch.
My other favourite thing about working at Envato is that the team I work with is really collaborative, so I get to do so much more than just designing from a brief. The way we collaborate on ideas for content goes a long way towards making a great working relationship – the content marketing team are definitely not the ones inspiring our ‘How to make a designer cry’ social posts. Which leads me to another great thing about designing at Envato – coming up with design jokes for social media. I can’t believe part of my job is to create memes!
Ready to get creating? Head over to Envato Elements to get started, and don’t forget to tag your Envato-made creations with the hashtag #madewithenvato on Instagram!
