JustSketchMe

How to get your instagram feed aesthetic and fun to look at

Let's get those IG's popping!

If you’re an illustrator or artist right now, chances are you’ve got an Instagram to show off your work and hopefully inspire others to give you some more.

Social media has, for all its terrors and metaversal chaos, been a serious boon to creatives as it has increased the scope of their potential exposure manifold by simply allowing their pages to exist.

But managing and running your own Instagram is a laborious task and a potentially tricky one if you run out of idea steam and let the comparison game deflate your self-worth.

Hey. It happens to the best of us.

In the spirit of collaboration and lending a helping hand, we thought we’d share some tips that help us keep our Instagram page nice and visually pleasing, and maybe they could help you too.

Colour palette selection

Restrict those colours:

The only time your feed should display every colour of the rainbow is pride month.

After centuries of being exposed to brands and marketing, the human brain loves to categorise affection and aversion to content through the instantly recognisable traits of the things they consume.

Choose palettes or colour schemes that reflect you, your art and your page and stick to them. This will help to differentiate you in a sea of similarly talented and savvy individuals and help you carve out an identity for yourself.

Change modes, often:

Our social media channels are constantly coming up with new ways to entertain and ensnare attention spans.

Think snapchat leading instagram stories, tik tok leading to reels.

Use these to your advantage, as early adoption not only makes you seem ahead of the curve but also gives you access to the reach boosts that usually accompany these kinds of feature launches.

social media research

Look at what others are doing:

Nothing happens in a silo except milling the same old thing over and over again. Don’t be a silo. Be a spy.

Go and have a look at some pages you admire and love to look at yourself, and see how they craft their feeds. Chances are that they're also stressing really hard about their output and what they put out into the world, but if you’re liking and engaging with their content then that probably means they’re doing something right.

Follow suit and try to adopt the mindset of someone who you’d like to engage with you and your page, and what they might like to see.

process work illustrations

Post the process:

This is a bit of a subjective one, but process work is often quite beautiful and iterative and makes a for a nice addition to your content pillars. Think whimsy, wispy lines feature an array of poses and silhouettes.

It just works!

close up illustrations moebius

Close-ups are your friend:

We all have that one little corner of a drawing that we’re super proud of and want the world to see. Post it! Use crops and zoom-ins to your advantage to not only stretch your content out over more posts but also flaunt the devilish amount of detail that goes into your work. No one’s going to do the work for you, so revel in the little things yourself and give people the opportunity to fall in love with your stuff. :)