Having fun communicating visually: Thing 4

Thing 4 introduces two fun and easy to use mobile apps that you can use to illustrate and enliven your posts and interactions online - PhotoFunia and Quik. I downloaded both to my Android phone and having spent some time experimenting with what they offer, I can see plenty of opportunities to use them especially on social media.

I'm going to focus on PhotoFunia today and yes, it lives up to its name. A word of warning: you may have find yourself having a bit too much fun. This I discovered having spent almost an hour morphing the faces of my family into an increasingly ludicrous variety of scenarios - not to worry, they should prove handy for some LOLs on the family WhatsApp group.

OK, returning to message: I decided to take two textual messages, the first one promoting a new Musician in Residence initiative in our library and the second "Join Your Library" to tie in with an upcoming membership drive. I also enjoyed this process.

PhotoFunia is mainly concerned with manipulating photos of the human face, and this perhaps is not so relevant for a work or professional situation. However, there are opportunities to jazz up purely text based messages which could inject some personality into your library's social media presence. I really liked the classic look of the neon sign and the light writing option felt modern, urban and a bit edgy. The history and book nerd in me nearly swooned with the chance of adding my message to the spine of some dusty tomes.


I was delighted with the end result and look forward to experimenting with this handy little tool. I think I will use it mainly for promoting events, and for short snappy call to action promotions on social media, "Sign up to our Newsletter",  "Learn a Language", "Library opening soon", or in building up to a big announcement. Another application could be to illustrate blog posts or web pages in the rare moments when a search of pixabay or our digital repository fails to inspire, e.g. "Learn a Language" for example.

I'm looking forward to having some more PhotoFunia in the future!