Instagram Story Highlight Covers: How to make them for Free

I’ve been seeing everyone create Instagram Story Highlight Covers and I knew I had to figure out how to create Instagram Story highlight covers for my profile. Instagram Story Highlight covers allow you to add customization to your profile and let your audience know what you’re all about. This can be a really great resource for bloggers! You can easily save important stories as highlights under your specified categories and your audience can recap them later! And don’t forget to grab your Free Instagram Strategy Checklist below after you learn how to create the Instagram Story highlight covers!

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to create Instagram Story highlight covers for free on one of my favorite apps Canva. I only have 6 simple steps for you to create your own highlight covers!

1. Go to Canva and create a new Instagram story highlight cover

You can make an account for free! Crazy right?! Canva is a really great free resource that you can use to create all kinds of projects from worksheets, Pinterest graphics, and these Instagram story highlight covers. I recommend that you use the custom dimensions 1080X1920 to create your covers.

Now you have your blank template and you are ready to create your amazing highlight covers!

2. Utilize the shapes to customize your cover!

You can utilize shapes to add different elements to your cover. If you would like, You can easily change the background of your project by selecting ‘background’ from the left sidebar. You have all the patterned options you can possibly think of to really make your cover jazzy. If you want to just stick to your brand aesthetic and you have a specific color code you can choose that option and enter your color code in.

Add a circle (if you’d like) to the middle of the cover. I put mine to about 500X500. If you don’t want to use a circle, you can totally skip this shape and just place your graphic or words that you would like to use. You can also feel free to use any other shape your heart desires.

3. Search for Illustrations

Under the search bar, you can search for whatever image you feel like fits your category. *Protip you can change the colors for any illustration so don’t be afraid choose one that you don’t think fits with your theme. You can always customize it. I personally used all free illustrations, but if you’re feeling fancy Canva has some low-cost graphics for around $1 as well.

4. Add Text

I like to add the text fairly low on the screen so that once I actually upload it to the Instagram story the text won’t show and only the icon I created will show. This is a step you can totally skip if you would like because it is a personal preference. You can also use the text option to add a word or phrase instead of a graphic.

5. Use the copy button

Duplicate the cover to easily create different categories. This makes it super easy to just change the icons or even if you’d like to change the background color it is really simple. Instead of having to add each element individually, just duplicate the entire page!

6. Download and Send to your phone to upload to Instagram!

Once you have your new story highlight covers you can easily upload them onto Instagram. The great thing is that Instagram has now made it easy for you to update your covers without having to upload each one onto your story.

Once you actually upload your highlight covers, don’t forget to actually add things to them! Whenever I stumble upon new accounts I like to check out what they have in their story highlights to get a better feel for the person. Some of the common categories are the blog, food, unboxing, or clothing but you can really get creative and have highlights that best represent you and your brand.

I created this free Instagram Strategy Checklist for you to easily make sure your profile has all of the right elements. Go ahead and get this checklist delivered for free straight to your inbox. Happy Instagraming!