How NEWNESS Does Instagram
At Projector, we’re fortunate to work with brilliant brands to help bring their visions to life — and now you can learn from them, too. Tips, tricks, and insights, directly from the marketers, designers, and creatives who walk that walk, below.
We sat down with John Kim, Head of Design at NEWNESS — a live streaming platform for beauty creators — to find out how they use Projector to build their visual brand on Instagram and continue to grow their beauty community. We love NEWNESS because they know that there is no value in content creation without authenticity and vulnerability. Everything they do ladders up to their mission: to re-introduce genuine, human connection to the digital beauty community.
What is your creative strategy for Instagram?
If it’s not fun, uplifting, or educational, don’t post it. It’s less about projecting a certain brand image, and more about sharing content that brings joy or shows something NEW.
How do you maintain a consistent brand identity in your posts?
You’ll notice design decisions on our site and Instagram that balance the line between building a recognizable platform and focusing attention on our platform’s creators. For example, we use black backgrounds to “turn the lights off” and bring focus to the Creators’ content, much like in a dark movie theater (while still using our primary green as an accent, of course).
How does Projector help you build your content?
We create nearly 20 assets per week, and 90% of them are made in Projector.
We use the GIPHY integration a lot! We recently uploaded some brand elements for our Creators to use onto GIPHY, so it’s been a really nice seamless experience to use across platforms.
With our ethos of constantly evolving our brand, there are so many times we want to try out new visual elements on social or warp something for a video. Projector seems to be one step ahead of us when it comes to anticipating our visual needs. This range really allows us to draw inspiration and expand our visual language whenever we feel stuck.
It’s lightweight enough for a non-designer to pick up quickly while still being robust enough to create company-wide templates.
How does Projector help you plan your content?
We have templates set up in Projector. We use it for all of our social planning.
Every week we duplicate the stories we have for IG posts and stories.Then, our head marketing person lays out the social media flow for the week, looking at the calendar of everything going live. Someone on the team reaches out to creators to feature them while someone else writes the copy.
The marketing team handles 75% of the design using our Projector templates, and then the Head of Design puts the final polish on it.
Finally, we round it off and put our final assets into our Projector presentation.
Our branding agency also uses Projector (instead of Google Slides) to easily grab assets we’ve created and use them in other places.
Why do you use Projector over other creative tools?
Projector is a much more approachable version of pro design tools without all the frills. It was such an easy transition for me when I was first trying out the product and looking for something to make it easier to collaborate on creative projects with our team.
How do you use Instagram to build your community?
NEWNESS is not so different from being part of a book club, or a Dungeons & Dragons group, or a running club. On NEWNESS, beauty is the conduit.
We hope that people will meet on the platform as strangers, and eventually leave as friends!
NEWNESS allows beauty content creators to connect with their fans in intimate, community-driven ways, where beauty is just the beginning of the conversation. You can learn more about NEWNESS at newness.tv.
