Your Instagram account won’t look completely polished without a stylish frontline of highlight covers. The highlight bar navigate your brand’s media storage and is key to overall esthetic composition. But most importantly, covers have to resonate with your company brand identity. 

We have investigated the best highlight cover examples of different styles and found ones that have inspired us the most. Moreover, in this article you’ll find helpful resources which will help you to achieve the similar results.

✨ Before you start, discover 50+ Instagram bio ideas for your business profile

Black and white 

Black and white is an established and everlasting classic that presupposes something that should be taken seriously. Take off the color palette and let your business speak of its quality, power and credibility. Indeed, nothing gives a chic sense and presents solidity more than a black-and-white combination. Whether you are a start-up or a medium-sized business, going black&white would be an unmistakable decision. 

Similarly to the examples of @delightful and @amazing.architecture below, you can translate the confidence through classy logos and highlight icons. Also, you can temporarily add color to one of the icons for a special variation for holidays or campaigns.

Resource tip: Unless you have your own black&white images of high quality, just use Desygner. The platform has one of the most extensive professional photo stock collections of 150+ million pieces and customizable templates.

Text effects

If you are keen on details, choose text with visual effects. An image integrated into text or a letter gives a pleasing feel and it is an excellent option for brands that operate in creative industries. 

@blossom demonstrates beautiful text flower effect in its logo and handwriting-style font of a neon color. Through its highlight covers and logo, the brand states that you can expect high quality and aesthetically oriented content. 

Resource tip: QuatesCover focuses on text-based images and provides everything you need to turn any text into instagramable graphics for your account. Their in-house designers produce creative fonts specifically for social media usage. Also, there are many templates for creating highlight covers of the ideal format in the “Social Media Story” section. 

Vintage

A vintage logo can reflect a company’s longevity and highlight its solid roots. To reach a retro effect and call back past aesthetics, you need to incorporate muted color palettes and some cartoon texture i. It will perfectly suit the business that operates in a niche market and periodically throwbacks to its unique story.

People in social media love the nostalgic vibe, so like in the brilliant examples of Ritz and Benefit, you can transmit vintage elegance through the face of your brand. It instantly brings up past decades’ spirit in its best and evokes warm feelings from the social media audience. Additionally, you can successfully implement a nostalgia-based campaign and make a specific audience loyal to your account with such visual assets.

Also, you might want to follow 1stdibs example, a shop specializing in vintage furniture that has adapted vintage under current social media trends. It has adjusted vintage style by saving key symbols and typical vintage compositions but added modern brightness and digital quality detailing.  

Resource tip: We recommend the Snappa app to stylize your highlight covers for vintage. It offers great old-fashioned templates along with a variety of visual pieces. 

Real Photos

One of the simplest yet effective ideas is to use your own footage for highlight covers. Turning real photos into symbolic assets can reflect a company’s uniqueness and success. 

You don’t need to be a scientific organization to follow the Cern example, which showcases iconic and authentic moments of the company in the highlight covers. Such a move explicitly says that a company is confident and successful in what it does. 

Also, you can use photos of your most outstanding products as covers. Maison Pierre Herme shows an excellent example by utilizing high-quality pictures of its cakes and pastry on the white background. Thus, the patisserie allures its fans to explore more via such a good preview. 

Resource tip: We recommend creating this kind of highlight cover in PicMonkey, which allows convenient drag and drop features. It also offers many special effects, in case you need to edit real photos.

Colors

As an alternative to images and icons, you can focus on colors, which is also a great decision to attract attention from your fans or visitors. Many choose to use colors for highlight covers because they look professional yet pleasant and stylish. 

For example, you can apply your signature color to all the highlights as Selfriges does. This would make people remember you better due to the human nature of association. 

A more creative approach to colors is to embed some ornaments onto mono-color as a sublayer. In the brilliant Etro’s example, you can see their famous prints applied to flat colors in a slightly obvious way. That overall, gives a completely chic look. 

Design Interior Homes demonstrate other examples of a color-focused approach, but with some sophistication. Note that their colorful highlights also ideally match their logo. If you work in a creative industry like interior design or fashion, it is worth following this idea. 

Resourc tip: Unsplash would equip you with tons of creative mono-color images. And Over will offer you more than 500 fonts and 67,000 ready-to-use graphics. Also, this app has been designed especially for Instagram needs so that it will suggest the right resolution for highlight cover. 

Green ideas

If your business operates in the eco/green market —  it’s a big deal and you should indicate that in the visuals that represent you. It is important to let your visitors know your brand’s philosophy, especially if you incorporate sustainability principles into your business. Thus, people can quickly identify that your brand is green-oriented and then start exploring your content. For this case, it is not necessary to design something sophisticated and detailed; you can follow the example of Greenpeopleuk and create some simple and sweet pictures of pastel tone for covers. 

Otherwise if you insist on creative sophistication, Junglow is a perfect example for that.

Logos and highlight icons must match to be consistent in bearing a symbolic value. Also, you can’t make a plant-based logo or highlight icon without making them cute. So, your account’s look would impress its visitor with a friendly vibe and under the aegis of a crucial mission. 

You can get a nice set of plant-based icons for your highlights here.

Conceptualism

We suggest opting a saturated palette for those who want to stand out with their highlight covers on Instagram. Combining many colors, styles, and textures would earn you either an awesome or an eccentric/ weird look. So, if you decide to go this way, be careful with your artistic vision. And yet, let us inspire you with the example of NYX below that managed to mix unmixable. 

Or, if you would like to go more artistic in contemporary conceptualism, look at the @details_in_vogue approach.

Resource tip: We suggest you use Adobe Spark for such a challenging occasion, as it provides thousands of conceptual templates and creative assets. You would be able to design your highlight cover with the entire Adobe Stock royalty-free photo collection and any of Adobe Fonts of your favor.

Minimalism

Less is more. And the most trendy logo and highlight cover ideas refer to minimalism. If you decide to create highlight covers in a minimalistic style, remember that their design shouldn’t include complicated lines, and their look should have a catchy effect. Thin and clean lines, short color pallets, geometric or smooth shapes, and deceptively simple design are all clues to your audience’s imagination and inspiration. 

For example, Bespoke Wine Collection presents its frontline icons in the same color, thin lines that give an elegant effect. Most importantly, they relevantly keep the symbolic value of their industry.

Resource tip: Similar to Bespoke Wine Collection’s highlight covers and many more, you can create in PlaceIt. The platform provides thousands of professionally pre-design templates that can be adjusted to your taste and needs. 

To highlight the above

We hope that this article was helpful for you to identify your go-to style. And we believe that those resources would enable you to beautify your profile with custom Instagram highlight covers and icons. 

Remember, nothing would make you look more adorable for the Instagram audience than personally elaborated style and visuals. So, start crafting your own story covers that would join top aesthetic accounts on the platform.