Tips to Help You Create Instagram Story Templates
Whether you’re hustling on the side or in it full time, being active on social media is definitely part of the game. The problem is – the game also has 5,000 other parts to it, and they all need attention. So, one of the best things you can invest time and energy into (across the business board) is creating templates for yourself! And today, we wanted to share our top tips to help you design beautiful (and on-brand) Instagram Story templates. Read on to learn how we approached doing this for ourselves and how you can quickly create them too!
Step 1 / Create Color Blocks for Foundation
Whenever you’re creating something for your brand, it’s important to build it on a strong foundation. So, snag yourself an image with your brand colors in it since you can’t type color codes into Instagram. Have it ready? Ok, let’s make some color blocks!
Open up the Instagram app and then open up Stories. Then, pull up the image or graphic that you snagged that has your brand colors in it. Select the pen tool and then the color dropper so you can select a specific color from your image. Move the selection tool around the image until it is on the color you want and take your finger off of the screen to select it. Then, hold your finger on any part of the screen until the entire space fills in! From there, simply hit “Done” and then save the color block to your camera roll using the built in save tool. Go ahead and repeat this process to create as many color blocks as you want.
Step 2 / Pick Your Patterns
Creating templates that are as eye-catching as they are easy to use is the goal here, and nothing stops people in their tracks quite like patterns. They are a great design tool for you brand in general, so if you don’t already have a brand pattern, we suggest working with your graphic designer to create some or you can pick up stock graphic designs in The Shop! Here is what we recommend having in your pattern play-box:
Watercolor wash
Repeating pattern
Single graphic element
Step 3 / Get Your Design On
Ready to get at it? Whether you are creating templates in your favorite app or opening up your design software, here are our top tips to help you design beautiful (and useful) Instagram Story templates for yourself!
Tips to keep in mind when you’re designing:
Don’t forget to mix things up! You want to have different templates for different uses, so make sure you end up with a bunch of options to play with
Alternate the composition of each template. You can easily do this by “anchoring” different corners of templates with color blocks or patterns
If you are using the Unfold app (it’s our favorite!), don’t be afraid to “not fill” the image block. We often upload a color block and move it within the image area to weight a slide differently
Make sure you are giving yourself whitespace for text!
If you are creating Instagram templates in Photoshop, Illustrator or a program like Canva, be sure to create your canvas at 1080x1920px
In the end, you should create templates:
For single image features
For double image features
For Image collages
That have a lot of space for text
