Figuring out the aesthetics of your instagram feed isn’t necessary, but in the growing technological age it is important to utilize our online platforms to set positive first impressions on your identity and talents.
“First impressions are often signals from the deep that we should credit oftener than we do.”
~ Katherine Anne Porter
With social media we are given the resources to fine-tune our personalities and impressions that we may set on people. This doesn’t mean that we should falsify our identities completely, but rather enhance our highlighted traits to support our connections and potentially our careers.
- Colour Scheme
Colours have an immediate impact on the human brain as we are biologically and socially built to associate colours with certain symbols or feelings. When you are deciding on a colour scheme it’s good to start with neutral colours. Do you prefer white, black, brown, or grey? It’s good to incorporate most neutral colours within your feed but it helps to solidify your colour scheme by emphasizing one neutral colour. This matters because you don’t want each post to be a vivid or loud colour as it can clash and showcase a lack of balance. It’s hard to emphasize specific posts if all of your posts are filled with colour.
Once you have stuck to your main neutral colours, it’s time to incorporate your primary and secondary colours. It doesn’t have to be too serious! Depending on the season I tend to gravitate towards purples and greys for the winter and green + blue + white for the summer. It doesn’t have to be calculated, just try to be aware when observing which photos you choose to post and what main colours are dominant in each photo.
2. Lighting
Lighting works hand in hand with your colour scheme and instilling a mood into viewers. A bright and saturated feed forms a mood of attentiveness, vibrance, and energy. A darker feed creates a solemn mood that is reminiscent of a cool underground bar. You don’t necessarily have to stay consistent with each post being bright or each post being moody, but if you wanted to specifically maintain the image of a bright energetic personality- it is best to maintain consistency. Another way you can go with lighting is to balance moody posts with brighter posts. You have to be careful with this as it can lead to an inconsistent and chaotic page if the moody posts are too contrasting with the brighter posts. Contrast is good until it loses your core message and spreads too many reactions to your viewers. What I’ve found most people tend to do is change the mood depending on the seasons. Summer and spring calls for a brighter feed while winter and autumn are cozier and muted.
3. Balance
Now balance can get a bit more confusing and is dependent on what your feed calls for. If you are a fashion/style personality, your feed is centered around you and your clothes. In this case when considering balance you want to incorporate photos of yourself or other people with photos of objects/views/nature. For example, I made this error of posting too many fashion pictures of myself and it created a feed with too many loud statement images.
As you can see through my 2022 instagram feed, it wasn’t necessarily a bad feed but it lacked balance and cohesion with some extremely saturated pictures and too many images with the focal point being my face or body. When you do this, your images lose their specialty and distract viewers from your overall personality. Likewise it takes away from the efforts put into each photo as it can’t be highlighted if all photos are loud.
In my 2023 feed I incorporated less images of myself and more images in the perspective of my lens. When you keep things balanced and utilize images of external views it helps viewers to see more of your life and less of just a face with nothing to attach it to. Likewise, this prevents the assumption or judgement that you are shallow.
4. Personality
Consistency is key. When creating a platform for people to judge- you don’t want to confuse them with polar personas or changing themes that occur too often. Through your selected images and incorporation of lighting, colour, and balance, your personality shines through if done right. This is less of a calculated action you must take but rather a moment to reflect how much of your personality you want to showcase through your feed. Once decided, it should be simple to subtly maintain a recurring theme while changing things up now and then. You don’t want to stay too consistent for too long as it can bore your viewers and showcase a lack of open-mindedness. Going too far from your personality can showcase a lack of stability and assurance of oneself. This sounds stressful but it doesn’t have to be if you are being genuine. What helps is to make a mind-map of different vocabulary that you find represents your page and the persona you want to portray. The ratio of staying consistent while also bringing in new images and ideas is probably 70:30. You want to stay true to yourself the majority of the time.
