If Millennials didn’t feel painfully seen enough with the recent TikTok about how their Instagram presence is outdated and embarrassing as fuck, the wise — and brave — Gen Z has returned with another round of tips for improving the aesthetic of our Insta stories.
Nicole (AKA @channingstatum) posted up her second lot of advice for Millennials wanting to improve their overall vibe on Insta stories a couple of days after her initial video blew up. She stressed that she didn’t mean to make it a generational thing (sure, lol) but just wanted to give some general advice on how to make Insta stories as aesthetically pleasing as possible.
@channingstatum Replying to @brennnalae ask and you shall receive #igaesthetic #igtips #greenscreen
The first big no-no for Nicole is using gifs, which is a dead giveaway about your age. She’s not wrong — the use of gifs in Insta stories is like the new-age motivational memes our grandparents use and share on Facebook. Big cringe.
Next up she gives a guide to properly using location tags. While it’s not an embarrassing feature, Nicole said you have to use it right to get the right vibe. Opting for the nearly-transparent grey box with white text is optimal for a low-key tag. Or you can make your own location tag with the (appropriately used!) drop pin emoji and the place name in Serif font.
My sister randomly messaged me “your Instagram bio is so millennial”. That’s it. No follow up or anything
— Dan (@Danbar951) November 29, 2022
Nicole also said the use of Spotify music over your Insta story slides is peak Millennial embarrassment. Do NOT add music and definitely don’t have the lyrics scrolling through your Insta story.
As someone who was online through the MySpace era, I feel this so deeply in my bones. There was nothing worse than visiting someone’s MySpace page only to have a random song suddenly play and you have no way to shut it up.
Add that to the fact you’re probably scrolling through Insta with your headphones in and you’re going to get your head blown off with someone’s surprise use of 100 Gecs on their story.
She also gave an arguably very good tip that I hadn’t thought of before: colour-matching your backgrounds to your shared photos. Nicole said she uses the eyedropper tool to get the main colour from an image and then changes the background of the Insta story slide to match it.
That’s genuinely quite an aesthetic game-changer, I’ll pay that.
Finally, Nicole said it’s important to use Instagram’s rulers when creating your post. They’re there for a reason and it makes everything look cleaner and therefore much nicer to look at.
Fair cop, there’s nothing worse than trying to smooth your brain out with an Insta scroll and instead being visually assaulted by someone’s Insta story.
