instagram

For ages I’ve been massively admiring other peoples’ instagram pages, especially those with consistent covers on their story highlights, so this week I did some investigation to find out how to do it – so that’s what I’m sharing today.

Let’s start with the results because that’s the fun bit! Here are my two accounts:

Now let’s look at how we get this.

Step 1 – Make the covers

I made these in the most simple way possible – in Photoshop.

Create a portrait rectangle in Photoshop (1080x1920px)
Fill it with a solid colour
Grab an icon from an icon library (I used Noun Project)
Centre it
Save out as a jpeg

Step 2 – Add to Instagram

I’m assuming you’ve already created some stories and saved them to your page as highlights.

Next, tap into one of the highlights. And choose “more” from the bottom right.

Next we want to edit the existing highlight

Now open the cover editor

And finally, choose a new image from your photos and adjust the image so it looks how you want.

If you do this for all your highlights, your page should end up looking something like this:

Well it’s finally time, and I’m going to start putting together the first volume of “Never Too Many Chickens” – a book based on the Instagram art project I’ve been running for the last 2 years.

This started in Feb 2020, right before the first UK lockdown, where for some reason I decided it would be a fun challenge to draw the various Chickens on Instagram, with their own accounts or featured on their owners (..parent’s..?) account.

The premise was that anyone with an account could nominate their own chicken, provide their name and I’d add them to my list.

List became very long very quickly. I also found it went out of date fairly often, so I had to keep re-asking for recommendations and permissions!

I’ll do a full project run down at some point in the future, but for now, here are some pics of my initial set up – as I take hi-res images of the originals, plus a short video because Fun!

Here I’m using the IPEVO V4K high definition usb camera, which I have attached to my MacbookPro. This is an upgrade to the basic iPhone photos I’ve been taking for the Instagram account, so should hopefully produce something usable for publishing.

Tag: instagram

NTMC – the book! (part 1)