Finding creativity and building a community on instagram and beyond
We are forever being offered advice on how to up our instagram numbers and get more followers but no one does it as well as this Sara Tasker.
Sara Tasker @me_and_orla
White Lion Publishing an imprint of quarto £16.99
Pics © Sara Tasker
If you are involved in design or any kind of creativity and participate on Instagram you are more likely, than not, to have come across the account @me_and_orla created by Sara Tasker. Sara set up her blog when she was on maternity leave in 2013 and she has become an inspiration to many aspiring bloggers and has in fact built herself a brand new and unexpected career out of social media. She has now written an informative and beautiful book about how she came by her success and how you might too become successful on instagram.
From the secrets of visual storytelling and crafting thumb-stopping instagram photographs, to archiving your day to day life whilst remaining authentic to yourself, this book is both an inspiring manual and an interactive tool for finding your voice online.
As she says ” Connection, communication and community are the underrated secret weapons of social media.”
The book is divided into four main chapters. Storytelling, Making Pictures, Archiving your life and Sharing your world.
The making pictures is particularly useful as she goes through what makes a good composition, why symmetry works, using negative space or a pop of colour, the rule of thirds and following your subjects gaze. She gives smart phone tips and talks about what grabs the eye.
“Photographing our everyday lives allows us to zoom in on the details and think about the small things that hold big meaning for us”
She finishes the book with ten commandments, for a healthy relationship with social media, I think they could equally apply to a healthy life. 1 Share, don’t brag. 2. Spend more time on other people’s pages than you do on your own. 3. Be human. 4. Mix it up. 5. Aim to serve others (instead of being self-serving). 6 Create what makes you really light up. 7. Follow your enthusiasm. 8. Stay playful and curious and don’t take it too seriously. 9. Take responsibility for your own boundaries. 10. Don’t compare yourself to other people.
In a book that is 190 pages long I thought that the book would have lots of repetition, it doesn’t. Sara has managed to cover everything you ever needed or wanted to know about using social media in an amusing and modest way. She is genuine, the real deal, and this with her beautiful images comes across on her instagram account.
creativecolour.org 