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Find out how to include a personalization screenshot in your Pinterest carousel pins.

Why use Carousel Pins?

You’ll get far more exposure using Carousel pins on Pinterest because Pinterest likes them so much more than ordinary pins. That means it makes sense for you to use them whenever possible, time permitting. With their ability to include up to five images, you get the opportunity to use great in-situ pictures to show off great product designs.

If you want to speed up the whole process of making carousel pins of Zazzle products, see how to quickly get all product views in this tutorial (opens in a new tab / window)

Here’s a link to the Pinterest Carousel Pin I made using the above screenshot (opens in a new tab / window)

Why include a personalisation screenshot?

There are far more people who have never heard of Zazzle than the other way around. When they see a product they like, they might be put off by thinking that it’s too hard or a lot of work to personalise it.

If you use one of your carousel images to set their mind at rest, you’ll remove that obstacle to selling and increase your chance of a sale.

Luckily you can use a carousel pin to show just how easy it is to personalize the featured product with the template texts / images the designer’s used.

How to get a personalisation screenshot at the pixel dimensions that Pinterest likes?

Pinterest prefers large pixel sizes for images, with a minimum of around 1000px wide. Read on to find out how to get a screenshot of the relevant part of your browser’s contents at around that size.

What you need to do is to use your browser’s Zoom facility to first enlarge what the browser shows.

You do need to use Firefox for this because, at the time of writing, Chrome and Chromium-based browsers (think Edge, Vivaldi, Brave, Opera and others) all cut off a chunk of the right hand side of browser screenshots when zoomed in.

Get to the product page, open up the Personalize pane and then zoom in. The keyboard shortcuts for this are

• Windows: <ctrl>+
• Mac: <command>+

Zoom in a few times to make things really big. When you’ve done that, right-click a blank area of the browser window:

Next, choose “take Screeshot”. If you prefer, you can use a keyboard shortcut to take the screenshot without right-clicking first:

• Windows: <ctrl><shift>S
• Mac: <command><shift>S

Whichever way you go about it, you’ll be given the option to save the full page or just the visible part; choose “Save full page”:

Behind the scenes, Firefox prepares a file containing a screenshot of the whole web page. After a while you’ll be given a download button to click:

Then just crop the image to the right size in your favorite image editing program. I use Preview on my Mac where I also add the speech bubbles.

Depending on the number of template texts / images, you might have to crop to an aspect ratio that’s not quite what you want. Never mind if that happens as you can adjust things when you’ve added it to your carousel pin.

Here’s the carousel pin I created with the above (opens in a new tab / window)

It’s not nearly as obvious as it should be that it’s a carousel pin because of the way that Pinterest displays them. It’s easy to confuse carousel pins with ordinary ones if you give them a quick glance.

The way to tell is to look for the forward-facing white arrow overlaid on the right-hand side. There’s also be a number of dots overlaid on the bottom indicating how many images are included in your carousel pin.

I put my personalization screenshots as the last carousel image presently but I might be tempted to try them as the second or third image in future.

We’d love to hear your comments or suggestions to improve carousel pins – you know what to do 💐

I’m on a roll! After developing the More or Less app, it was easy for me to develop this new one.

Who is this game for?

I’ve aimed “Where is Moji?” squarely at early learners / younger pre-schoolers. It teaches them a critical skill: to recognise and then find one pattern hidden amongst a screenful of others.

To make it fun, I’ve chosen the emoji used in the game from

• sports
• animals and nature
• transport
• everyday objects

Dad and / or Mum can sit in and help them learn the names of the animals when they come up. Lots of learning opportunities are there to use.

For even more fun, when they find Moji, they’re rewarded with a funny cartoon sound and a visual reward of a fountain of coloured circles, cascading down the screen.

I’ve designed it so that the early runs and levels have fewer emojis, with the number increasing as the game progresses. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can try the setting for a big kids game, which has far more emojis and a faster bonus multiplier countdown,

The easy and hard modes I’ve included for both the Kids game and the Big Kids game means there’s always a challenge. What’s the difference? The hard mode has more emojis and a faster countdown so even if you have a great reaction time, you’ll struggle to hit the top scores.

Get yours…

Download “Where is Moji?” here:

See screenshots of the game and a demo video

When you start each run, the screen shows you the emoji you’re to find.

When you’re ready, tap “Go” and the level begins. Note that the emoji you’re to find is repeated just above the “Go” button in case, in the excitement of it all, you forget what you’re to find!

Take a look at this screenshot of the last level of the Kids Game (on the easy setting). It shows how the number of emojis has increased:

If you like, watch this video of a complete game being played on an iPad. It goes all the way up to getting on the high score table – with the cheer you hear when you do! (I’ve included a different high score table for BigKids, to keep them seperate.)

We’re not quite sure what we can achieve via an iOS app and Zazzle so we’ve been digging around and having a play.

As part of that we developed a simple and fun app for iPhones and iPads aimed squarely at kids (big kids, too!)

It’s called More or Less Kid’s Game and teaches older preschoolers about the notion of more and less in a fun and exciting way.

Here’s a screenshot showing the core in action. In the previous screen to this one, the player was shown one of two emoji.

In this case (though you can’t tell) they were shown a flamingo. Now they have to decide whether there are more or less flamingoes than rhinos by pressing the More or the Less button. (Yes, we know it really ought to be more or fewer but we’re practicing being less pedantic!)

If they don’t make up their mind quickly enough, after a short while the bonus multiplier starts to count down and the potential score for a right answer reduces.

If they choose correctly, they get a positive, funny cartoon sound and a visual celebration as a reward. The run score they get (the bonus multiplier X number of images) is then added to the total score for the level.

If not, they still get a funny cartoon sound – but no visual celebration and no score.

There are 5 levels and 4 runs per level.

If they play with Dad or Mum at their side, they can get help counting the emoji to find out whether there are more or less.

We’ve made it so that the earlier levels have fewer images with bigger differences between the numbers of each. As the game progresses, each level has more images and smaller differences between the numbers of each emoji shown.

Get More or Less here on the app store.

We’ve added a new feature to Nifty to help your Zazzle store get promoted. You can now submit your store for promotion by the affiliates / artists that use Nifty as part of their promotion strategy.

When anyone submits a store, they’re first asked to pin/tweet/share 20 designs from a store that’s been submitted previously (chosen at random).

So there’s two ways to get promoted when you submit your store to Nifty, by:

• affiliates using the new “pot-luck” button in the Nifty Promo Control Panel
• someone submitting a store after you and your store gets chosen as the one to have its 20 products pinned/shared/tweeted

All good quality stores are welcome. Submit yours if you like – the sooner the better! If you think about it a bit, it’ll make sense…. stores submitted earlier have a slightly better chance of being chosen.

Submit yours here