Designing story and post templates that people can read

Why a template is worth the time

A template is a layout you design once and fill many times: the same positions for the headline, the photo and the small print, with new words and pictures each time. It saves you from starting with a blank canvas every week, and it makes your stories and posts recognizable before anyone reads the name at the top.

A template only helps if the layout itself is good, though. A beautiful design that puts the headline under Instagram's reply field, or white text on a pale photo, will repeat that mistake in every story you make with it. This post is about getting the layout right: where text is safe, how big it should be, how much of it to use, and how to keep a set consistent. The exact pixel sizes for every format are in our Instagram sizes guide; here we only use them.

Story templates and post templates are different jobs

Both are images with text on them, but they are seen in very different ways, and a layout that works for one often fails for the other.

So a story template should be bold and brief, with its message in the middle of the screen. A post template can hold a little more, but it has to survive being shrunk to a small square on your profile grid, which is covered in our post on planning a grid that crops well.

Safe zones on a 1080 × 1920 story

Instagram draws its own interface over every story: the progress bar, your profile picture and name at the top, and the reply field at the bottom. Text placed there is partly hidden. Instagram does not publish safe margins for organic stories, but Meta does for story ads: leave roughly 14% of the top, 35% of the bottom and 6% on each side free of text, logos and other key elements (Meta Ads Guide (opens in a new tab), checked November 2026).

On a 1080 × 1920 story, that works out to about 269 pixels at the top, 672 pixels at the bottom and 65 pixels on each side, which leaves a safe box from 65 to 1,015 pixels across and from 269 to 1,248 pixels down. Ads need the large bottom margin because of their call-to-action button. Organic stories have less on screen, so our own story templates use a looser rule: important text stays between 250 and 1,600 pixels from the top, which keeps the bottom 320 pixels clear for the reply field.

• For organic stories: keep the headline and key text between about 250 and 1,600 pixels from the top, and at least 65 pixels from the sides.
• For story ads: use Meta's stricter box, 269 to 1,248 pixels from the top.
• Either way: background photos and colors can fill the whole frame; only text, logos and faces need to stay inside.

Text people can read in a few seconds

Most template problems are text problems. Three things decide whether a story is read or skipped: how much text there is, how big it is, and how well it stands out from the background.

How much

One headline and one supporting line is enough for most stories. As a rule of thumb, stay under about 20 words per story; if you need more, split the message over two or three stories or move it into a post. Put details such as prices, dates and links in the caption, a sticker or the next slide.

How big

A 1080-pixel-wide story is shrunk to the width of the phone. On a phone about 390 points wide, everything appears at roughly a third of its pixel size. Our rule of thumb from that arithmetic: body text at least 44 pixels high on the canvas, which comes out at about 16 points on screen, the size of ordinary app text, and headlines at 90 pixels or more. Very thin fonts need to be larger still.

How clear

The web accessibility standard WCAG asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text (W3C (opens in a new tab), checked November 2026). Instagram does not require it, but it is a useful target, because stories are read outdoors, at low brightness and by people with weaker eyesight. Text over a photo rarely reaches it by itself. Three fixes work well:

• A solid or semi-transparent box behind the text, in a color from your palette.
• A darker or blurred area of the photo where the text sits.
• A split layout: photo in one part of the frame, text on a plain color in the other.

Leave room for Instagram's stickers

Question boxes, polls, countdowns, link stickers and mentions are added in the Instagram app after you upload the image; an image made in any editor, ours included, cannot contain a working sticker. A good interactive template therefore has a planned empty area, usually in the middle third, where the sticker will go, and a headline above it that tells people what to do: "Ask me anything about sourdough", "Which one should we make next?"

Our story templates include designs built around this, such as question and poll backgrounds, a countdown, a link-in-bio story and a weekly schedule. When you design your own, place a rough rectangle where the sticker will sit while you work, so that nothing important ends up under it.

A consistent set that does not look repetitive

Consistency comes from a few fixed decisions; variety comes from everything else. Decide the fixed parts once and write them down:

1. Two or three colors plus one neutral. More than that and a set stops looking like a set.
2. Two fonts at most: one for headlines, one for body text. Our template editors offer 14 ready font pairings, so you do not have to test combinations yourself.
3. One position for recurring elements. Logo, handle or series name always in the same corner, at the same size.
4. A small number of layouts. Three to five layouts, for example quote, tip, announcement, question and product, cover most weeks.

Within that frame, change the photo, the main color of the background and the words. Followers recognize the series and still see something new each time.

Extend the same system to the rest of your profile. Carousel covers, inner slides and last slides from our post templates can share the palette of your stories, and highlight covers made with the highlight cover maker in the same colors tie the stories you keep to the profile. Our post on designing highlight covers shows how to plan that set.

A checklist before you post

• Open the exported image on your phone, full screen, at normal brightness, and read it in under three seconds.
• Nothing important in the top 250 or bottom 320 pixels of a story, or near the edges of a post.
• Body text at least about 44 pixels high, with a box or dark area behind it when it sits on a photo.
• One message per story; details in the caption, a sticker or the next slide.
• Spelling, dates, prices and handles checked twice, since a posted story cannot be edited.
• For feed posts: write alt text. Text inside an image is not read by screen readers, and Instagram lets you replace the automatic alt text of a photo before or after posting (Instagram Help Center (opens in a new tab), checked November 2026).

If the photo you want to use has the wrong shape, fit it into the frame with a border or blurred background instead of cropping away the subject; our guide to posting a full photo without cropping shows three ways. Every story and post design we offer is also in one place in the template gallery.

Template design questions