Snapchat geofilters place pride in schools and communities

From tagging locations to promoting events, Snapchat geofilters have become an increasingly popular method of publicity.

Geofilters are location-based overlays that Snapchat users can apply to their pictures. Any user has the ability to create a filter by designing a graphic and submitting it to Snapchat’s website. Snapchat requires that the submission is a web-optimized form and follows their suggested dimensions.

Snapchat is a widely used social media platform with over 30 million monthly users, and pictures that are posted are often tagged with popular geofilters, thus advertising locations, events and more.

Junior Lillian Zeng decided to take advantage of Snapchat’s popularity and created a geofilter to promote the class of 2018’s Homecoming Quad Day this year.

Zeng’s filter falls under Snapchat’s category of “business filters,” which is intended for a specific event or a private location.

“We wanted a filter because most people use and love Snapchat, and it was a way to inject some more class spirit into our special day,” Zeng said.

The filter was designed on Adobe Illustrator and went through a few artistic revisions before being finalized. The final product was a design with the words “Junior Power” in blue placed over a dark navy gradient background.

According to Zeng, even small design elements like the exact shade of the background and the curvatures of the graphic  grew into hours of indecisiveness.

Although Zeng hoped to have her filter available for use throughout the whole 12-hour-day, she was unable to negotiate with Snapchat enough for an affordable price.

For a business filter, Snapchat charges $5 per 20,000 square feet, and to cover the whole school for the entire day would have cost $200.

To lower the price to $50, the filter was only up from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and was not active in the back of the school, the fields or the parking lot.

Besides business filters intended for advertising, users also have the option of designing community filters which are free to publish for public locations such as a city, university or local landmark.

Over the summer, sophomore Samyu Iyer decided to spend her free time designing Saratoga community filters. Her first two graphic filters were rejected by Snapchat. The first one was for the city of Saratoga, but Snapchat was looking for more filters that focused on smaller community locations where people are likely to gather and take pictures rather than an entire city. The other filter was just for her street, but Snapchat said that was too specific of an area.

For her third submission, Iyer chose to create a filter for Villa Montalvo, a garden center with hiking trails; it was the prime location for a geofilter to Iyer, as the park is popular amongst high school students. Students were already constantly posting Snapchat pictures to their stories from Montalvo, so it seemed likely that they would use a geofilter if it were available.   

The process took about an hour on Adobe Illustrator and was designed to resemble the Carriage House Theatre in Montalvo. By rearranging colors, text and shapes, and incorporating a transparent background, Iyer designed her filter to match the scene at Montalvo.

Two weeks after she submitted the design to Snapchat, the geofilter was approved and published. For Iyer, the process was a learning experience, something that taught her about graphic design.

“Making the filter was a really good learning opportunity for me, and I’d love to do it again when I find the time,” she said.