I have long neglected my Instagram account and it’s been many moons since I consistently posted content on there.
But, I’m getting back into the swing of things, posting Canva organization and design tips on my Instagram account.
Plus it’s a good excuse to spend time sipping my tea, exploring various stock photo websites and creating brand kit palette inspiration graphics.
Because sometimes you just want to make pretty things.
One of the things I quickly noticed as I have started (slowly but surely) re-starting my Instagram efforts is that you need to be careful with the positioning of your design’s contents when you’re creating an Instagram portrait sized graphic rather than a square design.
And that’s because your Instagram profile feed will still crop your designs to a square, which means a bit of the content on the top and bottom of your design is going to be thwacked off on that feed version.
So I wanted to show you a really quick and easy way to make sure you always know exactly where your feed image will be cropped, so you can make adjustments in advance to ensure your designs always look their best.
Resources Mentioned
Transcript
While you can still post square graphics on Instagram, it’s been quite some time that you’ve been able to post a larger, portrait oriented image at 1080 pixels wide by 1350 pixels tall.
But… your profile feed still crops those portrait images to a square, so it becomes really important to make sure that whatever your full Instagram image design looks like, that you’re not having any weird bits of text cropped off at the top or bottom, or partially showing logos, and things like that.
So I wanted to show you a really easy way to make sure you always know exactly where your feed image will be cropped.
I’ve got a portrait sized instagram design open here, and the easiest and fastest way to always know what is going to show up in that middle square is to add some guides.
First, I’m going to add a rectangle element and make it a bright colour so it stands out from the rest of the template.
Then I’ll go to Position, and then to the Arrange tab, and I’ll change the dimensions of that rectangle to be exactly 1080 by 1080.
Then let’s put that dead centre on the design, by choosing middle and centre.
Anything behind this square is what will appear in the cropped feed image… and don’t worry, this square won’t be staying here, it’s just to aid us in adding the guides, so let’s add those now.
If you don’t already have rulers and guides turned on, you’ll want to go to File, then View Settings, and then Show Rulers & Guides.
Now I’m just going to click on the ruler at the top here and drag down a guide into my design, and I’m going to snap it to the bottom of that rectangle shape that I added.
Then I’ll do that again and snap it to the top of the rectangle.
Next I’ll delete my rectangle altogether.
And now you can see these purple lines marking where the top and bottom of that shape was located, so I can see precisely what is going to show up within that cropped square, which means I also know what will show on my Instagram feed.
Don’t worry, the purple lines aren’t going to show up in your downloaded image, it’s just there for your own guidance.
So I can very quickly see that this “share/save” icon line is going get partially cropped in that feed image, but I can fix it by selecting those items and moving them out of the way of that guide. And I can adjust any other elements of the design that I want.
And now, I can rest easy knowing that my Instagram post will look great in both full viewing mode and on my profile’s feed.
