Holiday OG images for Halloween, Black Friday and New Year

The fourth quarter is the main season for links. Halloween in October, Black Friday in November, New Year in December: in these weeks the social media audience is itself inclined to spend and click. And a link cover works twice as hard in this season: an ordinary OG image makes a post stand out in the feed, while a holiday one also promises a benefit with a time limit.

The problem is that most sites meet the holidays with an old, “year-round” cover. Against the festive feeds of social networks it looks especially bland, like a shop with no window display in December. The good news: to keep this from happening to your links, a few images made in advance are enough.

The whole fourth quarter, October through December, splits into four stretches. Halloween is October 31, a Saturday in 2026: put up themed covers three to five days ahead and take them down on November 1–2, after that they look out of place. Black Friday is November 27: sale covers live about a week, from the 20s of November to the end of the month, and “Friday only” works great as a deadline in the subtitle. New Year is December 31: New Year covers are appropriate from mid-December until the end of the holidays on January 7. Between the holidays and after them, a neutral winter option helps out, more on that below in the “Snowflake” section.

By the end of October the OG Studio editor will get a separate “Holiday” tab, so the holiday templates are not scattered across the general list and can be found in one click. The set has four options, one for each stretch of the quarter:

• “Pumpkin Night”: dark purple background, a 3D pumpkin with a glowing face, bats and cobwebs. For Halloween, “spookily good” discounts and themed newsletters.
• “Black Friday”: a strict dark template with a yellow discount ribbon and a crossed-out old price. For sales of any size, not only the November one.
• “Garland”: a night-blue sky, a glowing garland over the card, a gift and snow. For New Year gifts, bonuses and discounts at the end of December.
• “Snowflake”: a light winter template not tied to any specific date. One universal option for the whole winter.

The process is no different from an ordinary OG image, only the contents change. Five steps:

• 1. Pick a template for the stretch of the quarter from the “Holiday” tab: the pumpkin for Halloween, the discount ribbon for sales, the garland for New Year.
• 2. Put the holiday into the headline. “20% off” loses to “Spookily good discounts until November 1”. If the wording will not come, ask the AI copywriter: it will suggest several options for your topic and tone.
• 3. Make the subtitle a deadline. “Valid until November 27” or “Until the clock strikes midnight”: a limited time boosts clicks by itself, so put the end date of the promotion right on the cover.
• 4. Add prices if there is a discount. The holiday templates have a price block: you enter the old price and the discount in percent, and the new price is calculated automatically (−20% by default). The old price is crossed out, and the “was/now” contrast is visible at a glance. No manual recalculation: change the percentage and the number updates.
• 5. Pick the format for the platform. Open Graph 1200×630 for link previews in Telegram and social networks, a square for posts, vertical 9:16 for stories. Fonts adapt to the format on their own, so you will not need to rebuild the text.

“Snowflake” is the answer to the main drawback of holiday covers: they go stale. A Christmas tree on January 8 looks sad, a pumpkin on November 3 even sadder. A light winter card with no specific holiday works all winter: from early December to the end of February it looks equally good in an article link, a webinar announcement and a winter sale.

A practical plan for the quarter looks like this: “Pumpkin Night” for the end of October, “Black Friday” for November, “Garland” for the second half of December, and “Snowflake” for the rest of the time until spring. No empty windows: between the holidays, links go out with a winter cover.

Three covers for the whole quarter come together in one calm evening: pick the templates, enter the topics and prices, export the PNGs. After that all that is left is to swap them on time.

There is a catch with swapping covers: social networks cache previews, and time can pass between “I replaced the image on the site” and “social networks started showing the new one”. So change the cover a couple of days before the promotion starts: that is just enough for the fresh preview to spread through messengers. And to keep the process predictable, version the image address: og-image.png?v=2. We covered the preview cache and ways to reset it in a separate article.

The seasonal tab is already in the editor: the autumn and winter templates “Autumn”, “Dark Autumn”, “Winter” and “Winter Night” are available right now in the “Seasonal” category. The holiday templates for Halloween, Black Friday and New Year will be added closer to the dates. You can also build a cover on any of the twenty permanent templates: enter a topic, get headlines from AI and export the PNG. And when the season opens, just switch to the holiday ones.