Visage Unveils New Version of Design Tool for Content Marketers

Getting ahead in small businesses these days requires an online presence AND creativity. Visage, a business devoted to assisting small businesses with visual content, addresses both. Visage has announced an update of its design tool for content marketers called Visage 3.0, officially released Feb. 23, 2016.

Emerging from Column Five Media, a full service visual content company, in 2013, Visage was created to give the small business owner the freedom to create his or her own designs regardless of graphic design skills.

Jason Lankow CEO and cofounder of Visage said in an interview with Small Business Trends:

“Our goal is to work with people and show them how to do their designs themselves.” He adds, “Today we’re announcing the launch of Visage 3.0, which includes some great new features that we’ve built based on user feedback over the past year.” Lankow said improvements included:

• Full freeform editing – Users can move/resize any and all content (text, images, charts, etc.) anywhere on the canvas as a group, or as individual assets.
• Integrations with Unsplash and The Noun Project – More than 150,000 icons and thousands of stock photos are available and ready for editing, (and 100 percent royalty free).
• Team collaboration – Users can share assets with a full team, allowing for real-time collaboration and edits.
• New templates – Templates are optimized for social and designed to be flexible enough to meet every brand’s specific guidelines.
• Customizable brand style settings – Users can create brand color sets with up to 15 colors and entire font families with up to 18 styles and weights. Fonts can be uploaded, or added from Google Fonts.

Visage’s services are offered on a subscription basis ranging from the basics for free, through $9 to $99 depending on the range of services required.

“Users can create a free account at create.visage.co and try one of our paid plans for free as well,” says Lankow.

Visage has a page explaining the power of colorful graphics to attract and keep the attention of customers. The page explains, “Colors, images and other design elements stimulate the human visual processing system, which helps us process information instantly,” and goes on to point out things like the fact that black and white images garner 2/3 of a second of attention while color images garner 2+ seconds.

Another resource offered by Visage consists of free e-books sent to your mailbox to give complete instructions in the use of infographics on your website. The name of one of these e-books gives a clue to a key strategy in building effective graphics, “The Content Marketer’s Guide to Story Telling”.

Column Five Media, Visage’s parent company, was founded by Ross Crooks, Josh Ritchie and Jason Lankow in 2009. It started out developing infographics for companies in the bay area, but soon graduated to worldwide brands including Microsoft, Facebook, Intuit, and GE. However the company kept the small business’s needs in mind and developed software to allow the non-expert to develop his or her own brand. The founders spun this division off into Visage in 2013.

Image: Visage.co

This article, "Visage Unveils New Version of Design Tool for Content Marketers" was first published on Small Business Trends