How to Change Highlight Cover on Instagram

Your Instagram Highlight covers are an elegant, one-tap way to elevate your profile from casual to professionally branded. These small circles are prime real estate for telling your brand's story, guiding followers, and creating a memorable first impression. This guide will walk you through exactly how to change your Highlight covers, how to create custom designs for a cohesive look, and the best practices for making your profile stand out.

Why Your Instagram Highlight Covers Matter for Your Brand

Before jumping into the "how," it's important to understand the "why." Your Highlight covers aren't just for decoration, they're a powerful branding and navigation tool. Think of them as the menu for your Instagram profile. When a new visitor lands on your page, your Highlights give them an instant look into what you're all about - your products, your values, a behind-the-scenes look, or answers to frequently asked questions.

Here's a breakdown of their strategic importance:

• First Impressions Count: A clean, cohesive set of Highlight covers makes your profile look professional, organized, and intentional. A messy or default set can immediately communicate the opposite. Since your bio and Highlights are at the top of your profile, they are a critical part of that first impression.
• Enhanced Navigation: Highlights turn your ephemeral Stories, which disappear after 24 hours, into permanent collections of valuable content. By giving each Highlight a clear cover and a concise name, you create an intuitive navigation system for your page, guiding users to the content that matters most to them.
• Brand Reinforcement: This is perhaps the most significant benefit. Custom covers allow you to infuse your brand's visual identity directly onto your profile. Using your brand colors, fonts, and icon style creates a seamless aesthetic that connects your Highlights with your feed content, website, and other marketing materials.
• Highlighting Key Information: For businesses, this is massive. You can create Highlights for "FAQs," "New Arrivals," "Tutorials," "Testimonials," or "About Us." Custom covers act as signposts, making it easy for customers to find the information they need to make a purchasing decision.

How to Create Custom Instagram Highlight Covers

The secret to polished Highlight covers is creating them yourself. This ensures they match your brand aesthetic perfectly. You don't need to be a graphic designer, with user-friendly tools, anyone can create a professional-looking set in minutes.

Method 1: Using a Graphic Design Tool Like Canva

Canva is a free, popular choice for creating social media graphics, and it's perfectly suited for this task. It offers ready-made templates specifically for Instagram Highlight covers.

Here's a quick-start guide:

1. Open Canva and Search: Go to Canva (the app or website) and type "Instagram Story Highlight Cover" into the search bar. This provides a pre-sized template (1080 x 1920 pixels), which is ideal.
2. Choose a Template or Start Blank: You'll see thousands of templates. You can pick one that's close to your style and customize it, or you can select a blank canvas to build your own from scratch.
3. Customize with Your Branding: This is where you bring your brand to life. Change the background color to one of your brand colors. If you have brand fonts, use them for any text. The key is consistency.
4. Add Icons or Text: Search within Canva's "Elements" tab for icons that represent each Highlight category (e.g., a "shipping" icon for your "Shipping Info" Highlight, a shopping cart for "Shop," or a microphone for "Podcast"). Keep the icons simple and in a consistent style. Make sure the main element is centered so it won't get awkwardly cropped when displayed as a circle on Instagram.
5. Create a Full Set: Once you've designed one cover, duplicate the page and swap out the icon or text for each of your other categories. This ensures colors and styles are identical across all covers, creating that cohesive look.
6. Download Your Designs: Download all the images as PNG or JPG files and save them to your phone's camera roll so they're ready to upload to Instagram.

Method 2: Finding Pre-Made Icon Packs

If you're short on time or prefer a ready-to-go solution, you can find pre-made Highlight cover packs on various marketplaces. Sites like Etsy, Creative Market, or dedicated graphic design resource websites offer countless packs in every imaginable style - from minimalist line art to watercolor and bold modern designs. When choosing a pack, look for one that aligns with your existing brand colors and aesthetics to ensure it blends seamlessly with your feed.

How to Change Your Instagram Highlight Cover: Two Simple Methods

Once you have your new cover images saved to your phone, it's time to update your profile. The process is straightforward and only takes a minute. Here are the two most common ways to do it.

Method 1: Changing the Cover of an Existing Highlight

This is the method you'll use most often when you already have Highlights on your profile and simply want to give them a refresh.

1. Navigate to Your Profile: Open the Instagram app and go to your profile page.
2. Press and Hold the Highlight: Find the Highlight whose cover you want to change. Press your finger on the Highlight circle and hold it down for a second. A menu will pop up.
3. Select "Edit Highlight": From the pop-up menu, tap on "Edit Highlight."
4. Tap "Edit Cover": At the very top of the editing screen, you'll see your current Highlight cover image. Just below your Highlight's title, tap the blue text that says "Edit Cover."
5. Choose Your New Cover: At the very bottom, next to the images from your Highlight Stories, you'll see a little image icon. Tap on this icon to open your phone's camera roll.
6. Select and Adjust Your Image: Find the new custom cover you created and select it. You can pinch to zoom in or out to ensure the icon is perfectly centered in the circle.
7. Save Your Changes: Once you're happy with the positioning, tap "Done" in the top-right corner. Then, tap "Done" again to return to your profile. Your new cover will now be live!

Method 2: Creating a New Highlight with a Custom Cover

If you're adding a brand new category to your Highlights, you'll need to start by posting at least one Story. Here's how to do it and set a custom cover right from the get-go.

1. Add Your Content to Your Instagram Story: First, post the content you want to feature - such as a new product, a tutorial, or a behind-the-scenes clip - to your Instagram Story.
2. Create the Highlight: While viewing your live Story, tap the "Highlight" icon at the bottom of the screen (it looks like a heart inside a circle). A menu will pop up, letting you add the Story to an existing Highlight or create a new one by tapping "New."
3. Name Your New Highlight: Give your new Highlight a short, descriptive name and tap "Add." The Highlight will now appear on your profile, using the Story you just added as its default cover.
4. Edit the New Highlight: Now, follow the same steps from Method 1. Press and hold the new Highlight, tap "Edit Highlight," and select "Edit Cover." Tap the image icon to choose the custom cover from your camera roll, adjust its position, and tap "Done" to save your changes.

Pro Tip: Remember, you can select any image from your camera roll to be your cover. This image does not need to be part of the actual Story sequence and will not appear among the Stories within that Highlight.

Best Practices for Standout Highlight Covers

Creating and changing your covers is the first step. To use them most effectively, keep these strategic tips in mind.

• Maintain Brand Consistency: This is the most crucial rule. Your covers should look like they belong together and belong to your brand. Use the same background color, icon style, and (if applicable) font across all of your covers.
• Keep Designs Simple and Clean: Remember that Highlight covers are viewed as very small circles on a mobile screen. Intricate designs, small text, or detailed photos will become unrecognizable. Stick to bold, simple icons or one or two words of text that are easy to see at a glance.
• Use Descriptive Titles: The cover's visual should work in tandem with the Highlight's title. Keep titles short, clear, and easy to understand. Try to keep them to one or two words, emojis can also be helpful for keeping them concise. Examples include "Q &, A," "Reviews," and "How-Tos."
• Organize Highlights Strategically: Your most important Highlights should appear first on your profile list (from left to right). To reorder a Highlight and move it to the front, simply add a new Story to it. The algorithm will view it as most recently updated and bump it to the starting spot.
• Think About Your Ideal Follower: Organize your Highlights from a potential client's perspective. What information would they want to see first? Prioritize key Highlights like "Start Here," "Services," or "FAQ" by placing them at the beginning of the list. Less critical content, like "Team Photos" or "Office Pets," can be placed at the end. While still valuable for brand personality, they are not the primary information a new visitor needs.

Final Thoughts

Creating and uploading cohesive, well-designed Instagram Highlight covers is a simple adjustment that delivers huge returns for your brand and user experience. It turns your profile into a polished, well-organized resource, giving new and existing followers easy access to information that helps them connect with your brand.

A consistent Instagram presence goes beyond just Highlight covers - it requires a cohesive strategy for all your content, including Stories, feed posts, and Reels. To simplify this, Postbase provides a clear, visual calendar to help you schedule and manage content across all your social platforms. This all-in-one approach helps ensure your branding remains consistent and allows you to tell a seamless brand story everywhere.

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