Hi,
so happy to see you back here.
Today we will dive deep into the whole Instagram game with a new post on How to maintain a cohesive Instagram feed and what you can do to achieve that goal.
So first of all, this is all what in my opinion a great (“perfect”) feed is and even if that is not your ideal I hope you can learn and pick up a few new things here and there while reading.
Where do we start? Of course, your feed is based on your photos. What do you take photos of? What are the colours? Many close-up photos? Blurry, focused? There is so much to consider when taking the photo. First of all, I don´t think you really need a proper camera, your phone can take great photos as well – but, if you really want to step up your game and are trying to always take a nice shot (especially essential with bad lighting) you should invest into a great camera that fits your needs. This especially comes in handy if you are at a café and want to take the most amazing flatay but a) it´s super dark and b) adding to this the lighting is yellowish (worst thing…) – you just use your manual mode to increase the brightness and because your camera photos (usually) have a way better quality you can edit the yellow lighting afterwards without any problem.
Now that we would be at the editing point we can go over to my second aspect which is colours. This might be the most important aspect because your whole feed “look” is based on colours. So for me these are dominantly brown and white tones with a pop of colour such as blue here and there. So if your feed looks super chaotic this might be because of your colour scheme, I´d always suggest to stick to 2-3 in order to have it easy when curating. Yet, if your feed is all about colours and the most beautiful rainbow, stick with that! That´s amazing as well.
(Mainly brown and white tones with a pop of colour which in this case is a beautiful rusty orange)
So what can we do to maintain the colour scheme? First of all, you should be aware that this can (and will) limit what you can post but I guess your interests will usually reflect your colour aesthetics anyways. And, we will of course try our best to make every photo work – More on that later on. To stick to your colour scheme you should focus on your main interests and what you decided to post on your Instagram as this determines which colours your feed will have. For me it´s mainly coffee shops, coffee and food, architecture, flatlays and fashion photos. For any of these I always look out for my aesthetic and colour scheme. So let´s say I come across a beautiful café designed completly in green – it´s beautiful yet green and if I really want to take a picture I´d pass on this one and rather look for one with brown or white tables and interior. Same for outfit locations and buildings to photograph.
And even if every photo still looks out of line and your feed doesn´t look like it is supposed to, we get to the most important point in relation to colours – editing. An updated How I edit my Instagram photos will come soon but if you want to get some impressions read my old one here. With all the editing tools we have at our disposal you can really achieve the cohesive look even if it seems impossible, especially if you only use one to two filters. I for my part only use the M5 filter on VSCOcam and sometimes A6 as base.
Let´s hop on over to my third and last point which likely will be rather long and the most difficult one – Structure. How to structure your feed properly to achieve a cohesive look and an interesting Instagram account that you want to revisit again.
For the structure you need to consider your categories and colours again but also what is in your photo – is it rather chaotic, detailed, bright, dark or calm? The structure is the point that I struggle the most with or to put it another way, the point that I waste the most time on. It get´s obsessive, so please do not let it end that way haha. 🙂
Firsty and most importantly what helps you to properly structure the feed and get that cohesive look, you have to categorise your photos and place them accordingly. What does that mean? You have to carefully organize your categories which helps the feed to look more interesting and curated. So never post three selfies next to each other or above each other, same for coffee photos and everything else. Sometimes two photos next to each other or above each other out of one category can look great though, but it only works with architecture and coffee/food for me.
As an example I attached the screenshot above. I started with an outfit photo, next to it another category (coffee) and next to that again something else (architecture). Above the outfit I used another coffee shot so that no outfit is above another and no coffee shot above a coffe ephoto and rather an architecture photo above the mentioned cafe shot. Kinda confusing and I think you get it. 🙂
This part of my feed is one of my favourites, simply because I just came back from London, still had my favourite shots to post and also because it features another aspect that I want to talk about next to the structured categories. You might have guessed it, it´s the rather dark photo of a café which has a “calming” effect due to it´s lighting. So, now what the hell does that mean? As you can see by the photo next to it on the right which is packed with stuff, details and elemts it appears to be chaotic and could be a risk for your feed to look just like that. So, by posting the “calming” photo instead of another really detailed one the feed becomes more relaxed and you don´t have to worry about the feed turning into a complete chaos. And it is dark, kind of breaks the whole cohesiveness and therefore has the effect that your feed looks more interesting and alive.
I know I know isn´t the whole Blogpost about cohesiveness? Yes it is and that´s exactly the point, because the photo is edited similarly, matches the colours and because my feed continues with the cohesive look it fits perfectly into the vibe even though it´s kind of a different photo.
Another example would be this part of my feed with the fairy lights photo.
Same with other colours as seen here:
It´s the same case (green donut photo, blue and green coast line photo). Because of the cohesive look the other coloured photos (which are still edited accordingly to the colour scheme) are “hugged” by the other photos and match perfectly.
I think we are coming closer and closer to the end (wuhuu) but I still have two bonus points I want to share with you.
First off, everything works exactly the same with your holiday feed or any other row of photos that do not look similar to your general feed. In this case it´s also a great example how it could work out if your colour scheme was more on the blue/green/white side of life.
And last but not least, two examples of my feed that (in my opinion) are unfortunately not that great:
Ok, we can definitely say that colour wise it would be cohesive and the structure is pretty good as well but the whole feed looks kind of “washed out”, rather boring and just has no interest to it. So I´d always recommend to play with contrats, pop of colours and brightness.
For this example I´d say the colour scheme again is quite all right and the structure as well, but.. You can see that the middle photo in the second row from below is pretty dark yet the photo below and next to it are really bright and with brighter tones so it just looks weird and not really put together. Same with all the other photos in my opinion, it just doesn´t really flow.
If you are ever at the point of not knowing how to continue I´d suggest to just start over your plans. Wherever you plan your feed (I do it on another (private) Instagram account) just archive all the photos from your previous feed and start to curate the feed another the way you want it with the photos you are planning to post next. Sometimes you just get a new perspective and a fresh new start by doing so. Yes, the transition might look weird but it is totally worth it to keep your creativity and a clear mind – Speaking of experience haha.
In case you read until this point and came down this far I hope you learned a lot on how to maintain a cohesive Instagram feed and are able to at least implement a few of the points I mentioned. 🙂 Let me know and please send me screenshots of your feed!
Thank you so much for reading!
– Christopher
Read more Instagram related posts:
https://twiceconfused.com/2018/06/01/my-favourite-instagram-photos-may-2018/