How to Design for Easter

Spring is in the air and so is Easter! Which means that everyone is gearing up to get their Easter specials and ads ready. I think you can make some beautiful graphics and designs around Easter themes, religious or not.

It’s important to know who your audience is and what kind of look you are going for. Whether its religious or not will be important as you don’t want to include religious imagery in a secular design. But you can still use secular imagery in religious designs as they are so tied together.

Most designs will call for some kind of fun brush type or a handwriting font would be appropriate. Pastel colors will always be acceptable and generally cute baby animals. Generally, I feel you want to go for bright and happy for Easter.

Pick Some Religious Symbolism

If you’re going for a religious look, you will want to look for some religious icons that has made it into the mainstream media.

Examples include:

Crosses
Disciples weeping
Angels
Tombs
Celebrates women
White
Ashes
Palm Branches
Lambs
Religious Scripture Quotes

Before picking any religious symbol though, it’s important to understand what these mean for your audience. If you’re designing for a religious audience, it’s important to know that Easter is one of the biggest holidays of the year and always falls on a Sunday in April.

It' happens around this time of year because for the past month, (40 days) Christians were observing Lent which is a time of reflection and hearing the story of why Jesus went to the cross. It’s also a time when Christians typically give something up for Lent.

Easter is a time of joyous celebration because on Easter is when Jesus rose from the dead. So a lot of religious symbolism around this time revolves around that story.

In case you’d like to know, since March is International Women’s Month, it can also be some what of a feminist celebration as a pastor once pointed out that it was the women in the story who find Jesus and tell the men, the disciples, that Jesus was alive. They were right although the men didn’t believe them at first.

Easter focuses a lot on the Gospel so this would be a great time of year highlight some scripture or quotes that fit in with the theme of Easter really well. There is a lot of quotes from the end of the Gospels of Mark, Luke Matthew, and John about this and there are other passages that would be good to highlight as well.

Any passage reminding people of the sacrifice Christ made for them and the joy He brings to their lives could make a great quote. I think personally Bible passages always look great with some calligraphy. They stand out really well when highlighted.

Secular Symbolism

A lot of Easter (and most modern Christian celebrations actually) revolves around Pagan traditions and around non religious symbolism.

Chicks
Eggs
Rabbits
Flowers
Pastels
Marshmallow Peeps
Birds
Carrots
Candy Baskets
Lily
Season: Spring

I would say that a lot of people these days have Easter as a celebration more so of Spring and spending time with family. Easter is generally tied into a lot of secular Spring celebrations and I think it’s interesting that we’ve capitalized on it so much.

I think for a secular design, it’s important to focus on celebrating spring with family. If you’re not religious, there is still a lot of social gatherings that happen around this time of year.

Ideas to Use Easter Themes for

Easter eggs and candy baskets are a huge tradition that a designer can highlight. Giving gifts to people could be a good idea to branch off of. Not only that but you could design something around an Easter egg hunt.

Perhaps have your design lead your audience through an Easter egg hunt with the products you’re marketing or selling. That might be a cute idea. Especially for social media, you could have an Easter egg themed content all month. Perhaps you hide an egg in a picture and someone has to find it every day on Instagram.

Or you have an Easter egg every day where you give a tip or an idea out or someone who comments gets picked to get a prize once a week. Or the first person to like your post wins something.

Not only that but for Instagram, Easter eggs make for really great designs. And you could even center a prize around winning an Easter basket of goodies.

Watercolor designs would be good to search for as a background or even a watercolor font. Perhaps even some stock photos or some simple DIY painted flowers would be good to search for.

Not only that, but I personally love flowers and so I think this is the perfect time of year to design using floral themes. Highlight your favorite flowers or use lilies specifically for some great imagery.

Another great idea you can call out Easter with is to talk about gardens. I saw that Target recently came out with a bunch of gardening stuff in their dollar section, and I think you could highlight some great places to hide Easter eggs in gardens. And talk about what flowers and plants are growing there.

Overall, I love Easter with the celebration of Spring. People use Christmas as a time to celebrate what we’re thankful for, but I think Easter is another great holiday because it’s also about family and celebrating. I think it’s a really joyful time of year and I always like to highlight it.

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