How to Make Clicky Instagram Highlight Covers [40 Free Covers]

Having an orderly, trappy and resulting set of Instagram highlight covers looks cool, sure — but it’s moreover a unconfined opportunity to show off your branding, verisimilitude palette and sense of style to your followers. And, stimulating highlight covers encourage profile visitors to click and view the Stories that contain all the important information you’ve substantially pinned to the top of your profile.

You can diamond personalized highlight covers from scratch or use a graphic diamond tool or photo editing app for uneaten support. Read this post and you’ll be, well, covered.

What is an Instagram highlight cover?

First: What is an Instagram highlight?

An Instagram highlight is a hodgepodge of Instagram Stories that a user has saved under a unrepealable category. Instagram Stories can only be viewed for 24 hours, but subtracting a Story to a highlight gives it a permanent spot on your profile.

An Instagram highlight imbricate is a photo or graphic that appears whilom the highlight name on your profile page. It’s like a typesetting cover, but for your highlight.

In the example unelevated (indicated by the undecorous rectangle), a malleate trademark uses highlights to full-length important information—a sizing guide, superintendency info, new launches, etc.—and each highlight has a cute floral highlight cover.

Source: Instagram

Highlight covers aren’t essential, but they do provide your profile with a polished look—and they make a unconfined first impression for people visiting your Instagram page for the first time.

Here’s how to make them.

How to create an Instagram highlight cover

To create an Instagram highlight cover, first you need to have an Instagram highlight. Follow these step-by-step instructions to create a highlight (and if you once have a highlight set up, skip this part).

How to create an Instagram highlight

1. Open your Instagram worth in the mobile app and click “New” in the highlights section unelevated your bio.

2. Scroll through your Story gazetteer and select the Stories you want to include in your highlight. Then, tap Next in the top right corner of the screen.

3. Type in the name of your highlight.

4. Optional: Tap Edit imbricate to edit the default imbricate picked by Instagram (a frame from the first Story in your collection). You can moreover do this later, once your highlight is live — we imbricate the process in detail below.

5. Click Add in the top right imbricate of the screen.

That’s it! Your highlight will show up on your profile page.

How to create a personalized Instagram highlight cover

Once you create an Instagram highlight, the imbricate will generate automatically — but personalizing your Instagram highlight covers is way increasingly fun. It’s moreover a unconfined way to showcase your branding and add an individual touch to your profile.

We’ve put together 40 Instagram Story highlight imbricate icons that are self-ruling to download and easy to customize. Or, you can make your own.

You can create circular Instagram highlight covers using any diamond app or software. We’re fans of Canva (and psst… Canva is now integrated with Hootsuite, making it simple to diamond trappy graphics for free). Here’s how to create a highlight imbricate using Canva.

1. Go to canva.com. Canva is self-ruling to use, but you do need to create an worth to log in.

2. You can diamond your own Instagram highlight from scratch using any circular image, or personalize a Canva template (that’s what we’ll be doing in this example). Type “Instagram Story highlight” into the search bar to find thousands of templates.

3. Select your favorite template.

4. Once you’ve selected your template, you can edit the text…

5. …and the colours…

6. …and plane add graphics, if you want to. Canva has a ton of self-ruling images and designs to segregate from.

7. When you’re happy with the design, click “Share” at the top right of your screen to download the image.

8. Segregate Download from the drop-down menu. Download the image as a PNG or JPG. If the template you’ve chosen has several pages, only download the pages that you want—in this case, we’re only saving page 2.

9. Save the image to your phone’s camera roll. Now, it’s time to use the image as a highlight cover.

How to transpiration your Instagram highlight cover

To transpiration your Instagram highlight imbricate to a personalized image, follow these simple steps:

1. Open the highlight from your Instagram profile.

2. Tap More in the marrow right corner.

3. Tap Edit highlight. Then, tap Edit cover, near the top of your screen.

5. To segregate an image from your camera roll, tap the photo icon near the marrow of your screen.

6. Segregate the new highlight imbricate from your camera roll. Then, tap Done.

That’s it! Your trademark new highlight imbricate is live.

8 tips for clicky Instagram highlight covers

Still searching for inspiration? Here are some unconfined examples of engaging Instagram Story highlight covers and tips on how to get it right.

1. Keep it simple

Instagram Story highlight covers are small—so small, in fact, that you’ll want to stave crowding that precious little whirligig with too much text or overcomplicated images.

Source: Instagram

Keeping your covers vital and wipe is ideal. Plane simple color-blocked highlight covers (like the ones used by the versifier above) are super effective: they’re not too busy, and pleasing to squint at.

2. Be consistent

Your IG highlight covers don’t need to be identical, but ideally, they’ll match: consider picking a unrepealable color, theme or pattern to follow when making your covers.

Source: Instagram

This restaurant uses a red circular frame on all of their highlight covers, creating a resulting squint plane though the photos within each frame are all different. It’s a small detail, but it gives the covers a cohesive look.

3. Be creative

Highlight covers are an opportunity to show off your creativity as a brand. Think well-nigh how you can infuse your trademark into your highlight covers as much as possible.

Source: Instagram

For example, paint trademark Farrow and Ball has highlight covers that squint like paint mixing together. It’s a very unique nomination that powerfully communicates something well-nigh the trademark (mainly, that they sell paint).

4. Use a branded verisimilitude palette

Another way you can incorporate your trademark into your highlight covers is by using your brand’s colors in the designs. Think of a imbricate like a label for your business: audiences should be worldly-wise to squint at it and immediately know that it belongs to you.

Source: Instagram

This cosmetic brand, for example, has a very resulting verisimilitude palette wideness their products and on their Instagram. The highlight covers are no exception: they take on the same trendy pinky-brown hues as the rest of the profile.

5. Use icons

Because there’s not much real manor on a highlight cover, using pictures that symbolize words and ideas—or icons—can be an spanking-new tool for communicating simple information.

Source: Instagram

Crate and Barrel’s Instagram highlight covers are quite basic, but the icons are constructive when it comes to symbolizing ideas (and they’re pretty cute, too). Icons are where editing apps like Canva really shine—there’s thousands of symbols and simple illustrations built right in.

6. Show off your products

If you use Instagram for business, your highlight covers work as a tiny marketing tactic. Instead of having to scroll through your feed to see all of your merchandise, Instagram users can get a quick squint at your products via the highlight covers.

Source: Instagram

This slow malleate brand uses highlights to full-length specific products, so curious shoppers can hands research the diamond and fit of variegated pieces of clothing.

7. Highlight what matters most

Don’t make the upper school mistake of highlighting everything. Highlights should be used to showcase only the most important and useful information to your audience. It’s good to be picky well-nigh which Stories you highlight (and as a bonus, stuff selective ways you won’t have to diamond a ton of highlight covers).

Source: Instagram

Pottery Barn Kids keeps their highlights simple and broad: topics like “Nursery,” “Toddler,” and “Bedroom” make it easy for Instagram users to find the inspo they’re looking for.

8. Don’t be wrung to experiment

Highlight covers often symbolize the highlighted category in a very literal way, but if you’ve got an idea, try it—one of the weightier things well-nigh highlight covers is that they can be edited or switched out if you transpiration your mind. Let your imagination go wild.

Source: Instagram

It’s not surprising that this graphic designer has very bold, distinctive highlight covers—they fit perfectly with his brand. For example, it would be the typical nomination to go with Twitter’s logo for the “Tweets” section, but this designer created his own personal version of that iconic bird.

Instagram highlight imbricate templates

Now that you know how to create Instagram highlights and add custom covers to them, download this stow of 40 self-ruling customizable designs and take the squint of your Instagram profile to the next level.

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