Design & Imagery Tips for Your Valentine Videos

Whether you’re looking to make a valentine video for your loved one or for your business, you want it to look great. That’s why we’ve put together some design and imagery tips for creating videos that’ll make your viewers swoon.

We’ll dive into three aspects of valentine video design in this article:

• Tips for choosing the right colors for Valentine’s Day videos
• Tips for selecting Valentine’s Day stock imagery from our Getty Images library
• Tips for selecting your own photos and video clips for Valentine’s Day

Click the links above to hop to a specific section, or dive in and read ‘em all!

Valentine’s Day Video Color Tips

One of the things that’s going to make your video feel like a Valentine’s Day video, rather than an ordinary video, is the colors. When you think of Valentine’s Day, the color red probably springs to mind. But rather than setting your titles to red and calling it a day, here are some tips to help you think outside of the red crayon box.

Find inspiration in Valentine’s Day goodies

Roses may be red, but they’re also pink, white, and yellow. Similarly, there’s a wide array of Valentine’s Day goodies with recognizable color palettes you can pull from for inspiration. For instance, here’s an example of how you could use candy conversation hearts as inspiration for your video titles.

Mix things up with multiple colors

Title colors don’t have to be a set it and forget it thing. Mixing up the colors throughout your video, when done properly, can look really nice. This is something we break down in an article of tips for using our Florist Trend Story template, which opens with a nice burst of different colors of text.

Our 7 Things for Valentine’s Day template also mixes up colors. Instead of keeping consistent text, text background, and subtitle text colors throughout the video, we’ve mixed things up for added visual appeal.

Note that if you’re going to mix things up, it’s important not to go overboard on the number of colors. You’ll notice that in the 7 Things video example above we’ve only actually used three colors—pink, purple, and off white. We’ve just mixed up the ways in which the colors are applied to each of the titles.

Use complimentary colors

If you are planning to use a mix of colors, it’s important to make sure they compliment each other. Like wearing plaid and stripes in the same outfit can make some folks cringe, using a clashing mix of colors in your video may make the viewer cringe—and that’s the last thing you want to do to your valentine!

Most non-designers, including myself, are terrible at picking out complimentary color palettes. But lucky for us there are a bunch of tools out there that make it easy to come up with a group of colors that looks good together. Some of our favorites include Color Supply, Color Calculator, and Coolors.

Coolors, for example, has an “Explore” section where you can browse thousands of color schemes. Here’s one I thought could work well for Valentine’s Day.

Keep in mind that you’ll likely be pairing colors so one is in the background and one is in the foreground. For this reason, it’s important to choose colors with enough contrast that they’re legible. You want to make sure your viewer is able to read the text on your video.

Not sure if your colors have enough contrast? Not to worry. There’s a tool for that too! Plug your color values into the Contrast Checker and it’ll let you know whether they pass a contrast and accessibility check.

Valentine’s Day stock imagery tips

Now that you’re ready to rock your Valentine’s Day video color palette, let’s take a moment to talk about using stock imagery leading up to February 14th.

Stock imagery is a great alternative for businesses that don’t have photo or video assets available to them, but still want to join the conversation and celebrate Valentine’s Day on social media. And lucky for you, you’ve got a library of over 1 million Getty Images photos and video clips at your disposal in your Animoto account.

We’ve put together some tips to help you get the most out of our stock library when you dive in to create your Valentine’s Day videos.

Tip 1: Keep your brand in mind

When searching through photos and video clips, make sure to keep your brand in mind. Even though you may take a break from your brand colors to use festive Valentine’s Day colors, you should still choose images that match your brand, both from an aesthetic perspective and from a mood perspective. Go with images and video clips that would resonate with your target customer.

Tip 2: Start wide and narrow down

Instead of putting in a lot of keywords all at once, start with something broad like “valentine,” “flowers,” or “hearts.” See what you get and refine your search by adding more words based on what you like.

Tip 3: Use connecting words

As you refine your search, use connecting words. You can include the words AND, NOT, and OR to help you narrow down the results to find the images that are the most relevant to what you’re looking for.

For example, if you do a search for “Valentine’s Day” and see that a lot of the results contain flowers but you know you definitely don’t want images with flowers, you can refine your search to “Valentine’s Day NOT flowers.” As you can see, the results contain couples, candy, and other valentine imagery—minus the flowers.

Tip 4: Search for “negative space”

Negative space is the blank space surrounding, and in between, objects or subjects in a photo or video clip. Including in it your search will return images with extra room built in for text. You can learn more in our blog post on how to use negative space in your videos.

Tip 5: Save the best for first

Use the images that stand out the most to you in your search at the beginning of your video. Start with an eye-catching visual that creates a connection, provokes curiosity, or features bold colors. This’ll help you grab attention as potential viewers scroll past in their social feeds.

To learn more about selecting stock imagery for your video projects, check out our blog post on 6 tips for getting the most out of our stock library.

Tips for choosing your own assets for Valentine’s Day videos

If you’re planning to use your own photos and video clips, instead of stock, for your Valentine’s Day videos, we’ve got some tips for you as well. We’ll start for tips for business videos and then provide a little advice for those of you creating a video valentine for your sweetheart as well.

Business valentine video imagery

If you’re creating a valentine video for your business, we’ve got good news. The color tips we shared above can help make your everyday assets feel Valentinesy, even if they weren’t created with Valentine’s Day in mind. As an example, check out our Valentine’s Day Gift video template. In fact, all of our Valentine’s Day templates were created using ordinary assets.

What we will say, however, is that it’s important to choose photos and video clips that feature products that make sense for valentine’s day. For instance, in the example above, diamond earrings are probably a better bet for a jeweler on Valentine’s Day than a man’s wedding ring.

And if you are planning to shoot brand new photos or video clips specifically for your Valentine’s Day video, you could try using Valentine’s Day-related props or objects that match the color palette of your video. If you do go this route, we just recommend keeping it minimal to avoid going overboard and overpowering your viewers.

Personal valentine video imagery

Creating a video for your sweetheart? For a family member? A friend? There’s really just one rule when it comes to choosing the right photos and video clips: choose photos and video clips you’ll know the recipient will love.

Here are a few ideas:

• Choose photos and videos of the two of you together. You should both look like you’re having fun.
• Find assets that represent special memories you share together. These could be from the past year or from your entire time together.
• Make sure you pick pictures that make your recipient look good—no one wants to look at an unflattering picture of themselves.
• If you’re comfortable on camera, try shooting a selfie video sharing a special message to include in your video.

If you’re looking for more ideas for spreading the love with video this Valentine’s Day, check out our valentine video ideas for business, family, your sweetheart, or just for fun.

Ready to dive in? Learn more about how to create Valentine’s Day videos with Animoto and start your video today.