Marc Schenker
March 31, 2021 · 10 min read
What Are Snapchat Geofilters?
Before you can break ground designing Geofilters, you have to know what they are. If you’re not yet a hardcore user of Snapchat, here are the basics. A Geofilter is an overlay, usually aesthetic and vibrant, that shows up in your Snapchat immediately after you take a Snap. According to Snapchat itself: “Geofilters are a fun way to share where you are, or what you’re up to, by adding a fun overlay to your Snap. If you have location services and Filters enabled, Geofilters appear at thousands of places around the world.” Adding a Snap to your picture is as easy as swiping on the preview screen of the Snap and then choosing which one you want to add to your image. Long story short, Geofilters are essentially an extra way for users to interact with this social-media platform on another level. Think of them as filters on steroids.The Basics of How to Design a Snapchat Geofilter
There’s a flow to designing your Geofilter. Approach it from the standpoint of product design, with a clear beginning, middle, and end.The Ideation Process
Like with all great products’ inception, think about the reason why you’re designing the Geofilter in the first place. Since Geofilters are goal-based, it helps to start out by finalizing how your filter will look and what details it will contain. Going back to the event example, one of the most obvious details to include in a Geofilter is the name of the event and where it’s being held. After all, you want users to let their friends know about your event in the time it takes to quickly send a Snap.The Design Process
When thinking about how to design a Snapchat Geofilter, understand that many Snaps involve headshots and selfies of people—so a successful design will make considerations for somehow incorporating faces. That’s simply the nature of the platform you’re working on as a designer. Good design is always geared to working in harmony with where you’re designing for. Unfortunately, the Geofilter design process comes down to some trial and error because only the actual selfies and pictures of people on the platform benefit from its facial-recognition methods, which Geofilters aren’t equipped for. As a result, you’ll likely have to iterate several Geofilter designs and then individually test out each one to ensure that it perfectly aligns with a selfie that you intend to use. You want your Geofilter design to feature adequate spacing in between the various elements of its design, for example.
The Branding Process
Since you’re promoting an event, you’ll probably want to include your logo or another identifying mark. Fortunately, Snapchat’s rules for branding are well-defined. These rules break down into two camps:- Geofilters for businesses – These are naturally promotional and are meant to include things like logos, your business name, etc.
- Geofilters for personal use – These are intended for personal celebrations like birthday parties and weddings

The Submission Process
With this out of the way, here are the specifics on actually submitting your design to Snapchat. Now that you know how to design a Snapchat Geofilter, you have to make it count within the platform. Access Snapchat’s On-Demand Geofilters page, and click on “Create Now.” This is where there’s a fork in the road. You have two choices going forward. Everything up to this point in this guide assumes that you’re creating your own Geofilter, which you can do in numerous ways. You use one of our marketplace’s Snapchat Geofilters as your template and then upload that to Snapchat. We have unique choices for various occasions:
Marketing Your Geofilter
Congrats on designing your first Geofilter. Next up is marketing it to increase your chances of making some money from it. The most obvious solution for where to sell your Snapchat Geofilter is our marketplace. By signing up to become a shop owner on Creative Market, you get a chance to sell any Geofilters that you design to our member network, which numbers over 3 million. Second, try social media. You can always use this channel to raise awareness of the killer Geofilter designs you’ve created. As with any content strategy, social-media curation on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest can lead to people getting to know your brand. In this case, it’s your Geofilter-design side business.
Designing for Events and Locations
As you learn how to design a Snapchat Geofilter, you begin to realize that the designs you’ve worked so hard on are actually meant to announce individual events or occasions. This way of looking at it makes it very easy to see the great potential of designing Geofilters for your side business or even main business. With events and special occasions happening nonstop every day across the entire globe, designing Geofilters can become a scalable, lucrative pastime, to say the least.Products Seen In This Post:

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Marc Schenker
Marc is a copywriter and marketer who runs The Glorious Company, a marketing agency. An expert in business and marketing, he helps businesses and companies of all sizes get the most bang for their ad bucks.
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