Create Your Own Instagram Highlight Covers With Canva

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Up your Instagram Story game. Here are a few easy tips on how to Create Your Own Instagram Highlight Covers With Canva.

Instagram is by far my favorite social media platform. It’s my Boo! My following has grown over the years and I love hanging out over there browsing everyone’s feed and stories. One of the most asked questions I have gotten is how I created my Instagram Highlight Covers. There are a number of programs and apps that you can create your highlight covers in but I love to use Canva.

Canva is my other Boo! I think it is so versatile and easy to use, especially if you don’t know how to use Adobe Illustrator or don’t want to invest in the monthly Adobe Creative Cloud fee.

That’s ok. Because Canva can be your new best friend.

Easy Steps To Create Your Own Instagram Highlight Covers With Canva

Step 1

Open Canva on your computer and select Custom Dimension in the upper right corner. Select custom dimension is the top left corner and create a story frame with the dimension of 1080 x 1920 pixels. You can also create a highlight cover using the Canva App for your phone if you wish. If you use the app on your phone, you need to select the “create a design” icon in the lower right corner and then choose Instagram Story. Then select “blank” and go from there. But for this tutorial, I am going to focus on Canva for the desktop.

Step 2

Now, you have two options. You can either create a highlight cover with a white background like I did or choose a color or patterned background. Totally up to you. Once you make that big decision, choose elements in the left column and search for an icon that will represent one of your highlights. I have my highlights framed with a circle. This is also totally optional depending on look you are going for on your Instagram page. When designing, try to center everything on the top third of the page.

You can create multiple pages of highlights by selecting the pages icon next to the trash can.

Step 3

Once you have created the most beautiful highlight covers EVER, you are now ready to download them. To do this, select the arrow in the top right toolbar. Select PNG and depending if you have multiple files or not, which pages you want to download. I personally like to do this step from the Canva App on my phone because it downloads the images directly to my camera roll on my iPhone. Again, totally up to you. If you download your covers from the desktop, just make sure they make it to your photos file.

Step 4

Now, head on over to your Instagram and select the camera icon in the top left upper corner.

To create each highlight icon cover, you will first need to add them to your story. Create a story for each highlight cover you want to add to your dashboard.

If you don’t have any highlights created yet, follow these directions:

If you have not created any highlights yet, select the +Highlight icon. Choose one of the covers from your camera roll that you just added to your story.

Select Next and give your highlight a title.

You can also reposition and enlarge your highlight cover. Just use your finger to move or make larger or smaller.

If you want to change your existing highlight covers, follow these directions:

After you create a story, you will need to select the highlight icon at the bottom of the story for each cover.

Press on the icon and select edit highlight.

Then select Edit Cover. Now choose the highlight cover from your story that you want to add.

You can also reposition and enlarge your highlight cover. Just use your finger to move or make larger or smaller.