Erato Magazine: Brand Building and Social Media Design
Cut, paste, publish: designing a digital literary magazine’s visual identity.
Social Media design for Erato Magazine by Olivia McNeilis
Social Media design for Erato Magazine by Olivia McNeilis
Named after the muse of lyric poetry, Erato Magazine is a non-profit literary publication with a passion for making art and writing more accessible. With a voice that’s equal parts personal and poetic, the magazine champions new and established writers while celebrating the emotional landscape of creative expression.
For this project, I developed a suite of social media templates and custom collage illustrations, drawing inspiration from neoclassical sculpture, editorial print, and the tactile feel of cut-paper ephemera. I chose collage as a flexible, symbolic visual language: one that allows the team to represent abstract ideas and thematic content through layered, metaphor-rich compositions. It also nods to Erato’s identity as a home for both literary and visual art.
The templates were designed in Canva, ensuring that the publishing team (who had limited access to design software) could easily adapt and reuse them going forward. Each post was crafted to echo Erato’s lyrical tone—fragmented, romantic, and grounded in storytelling. This work is a love letter to words, images, and the spaces between them.
I also had the pleasure of contributing a piece of my own: an art review of the HR Giger: Metamorphes exhibition, which ran from 11 June to 19 November 2023 at the Aleš South Bohemian Gallery, Czech Republic. My review exploring the dark, textured world of the Swiss visionary as is available here.