How to make your Stories stand out without using any apps

4.8K

This is an edited extract from my upcoming book. I’ve decided to share it because these tips are so easy to use and so helpful for those trying to make their Instagram Stories unique and recognisable – I think it would be unfair to keep them a secret 🙂 It’s only a tiny part of everything I have to tell about Instagram and if you like this post, make sure to leave your email in a form at the bottom of this page to receive a discount when the full book is published. And, of course, don’t forget to follow me on Instagram – @thestylejungle – for more insights on cool Instagram tips & tricks.

---

I must admit, I LOVE Stories! I love watching them, I love filming them, I love posting them. Sometimes I even ‘think in Stories’ – that’s when you’re doing something and imagining what would this moment look like on Stories, what caption and sticker will you add, what filter will you use. Sick, I know.

Apparently, it’s not just me going crazy. Most people, regardless of their age, occupation and level of Instagram-addiction, love Stories. In fact, 500 million people watch Stories every day! If you thought Instagram took over the world quickly, Stories did that 15x times faster.

The reson behind such popularity is that Stories gave us a chance to do two things we love the most – spy on other people and let them spy on us. Come on, admit you too love watching others eating, working out or doing their nails! Damn, I can never peel my eyes off @realradfood’s timelapses of her replying to emails and need I even mention @alexspodyneiko’s mesmerising timelapses of editing photos and videos! We’re all humans after all…

Using Stories is not only fun, it’s also a necessity these days. I would go as far as saying – regularly posting on Stories is probably even more important than using your feed. If your life was a book, the feed would be its cover – it’s polished, attractive and makes people want to learn more about you. It’s WHY we pick the book but not WHAT FOR. And Stories? Stories are the pages of your book. 24 hours – flick, and the page is read. Another 24 hours – another page is read.

If being less poetic, Stories is a way to increase your presence on Instagram and engage more with your audience. The best part? If you suddenly get over-excited about this whole thing and post gazillion photos and videos in 24 hours, you won’t annoy anyone. Why? Because no one is forced to watch your Stories! If they had enough – they’ll just leave and won’t click on your name again til’ tomorrow. Stories is a place to experiment and make mistakes. If people don’t like it – they will turn it off. If you don’t like it – it will disappear in 24 hours anyway.

The coolest thing about Stories is how breathtakingly simple they are – no tricky algorithms, hashtag rules, response rates or best posting times. Compared with Stories, main feed now looks like granddad’s old, big, sluggish car – it still takes you places but with lots of maintenance and little joy; whereas Stories are a brand-new sports coupe – comfortable, intuitive and is so much fun to drive. As long as you post something daily, you’ll be seeing the results! Just don’t be shy, it’s best to post at least 7-15 Stories per day. I’m sure I’m not the only one to get disappointed after clicking on person’s Stories and seeing just one random photo there – I mean, come on, I know your life is more exciting than that!

And it doesn’t take ages to make Stories. Yes, there are heaps of fancy apps to help you with colour-grading, cropping and pasting your videos or adding moving texts in trendy fonts or other eye-catching elements (birds that don’t look a touch less natural than those in James Cameron’s movies, anyone? ‘Pixaloop’ app, in case you were wondering). But the fact is, YOU DON’T NEED ANY OF THEM TO MAKE YOUR STORIES REALLY UNIQUE AND HAUNTING. 

Here are some tricks I personally use to make my Stories stand out. No extra apps, hours of work and annoying ‘freemium’ payments – anything at all! All you’ll need is your Instagram and a wee bit of creativity.

How to make your Stories text stand out

Text is the easiest and the most obvious way to make your Stories look really unusual. Did you know that there is so much more you can do to your writing than just changing fonts, colours and background? 

Though I don’t mind a little experiment every now and then, I generally love it when a person sticks with the same font and background colour on Stories. It makes them recognizable. I often watch Stories somewhere in between work tasks or on the run and might forget glancing at person’s name. Familiar fonts and colours help me recognise, whose Stories I’m watching at the moment. Lately, I’ve been using a lot of dark purple for my own texts, for example.

By the way, do you know how to make your signature colour truly unique? When choosing it from the given colour circles at the bottom, hold your finger at any of them a little longer and you’ll see a bigger palette with many amazing shades! What’s more, you can pick the exact colour from your photo – just keep on moving your finger from the palette and onto the pic! How about matching your font background to your lipstick?

• 

• 

Speaking of. Who said your text should always be the same colour and size? Oops, that was me just a few secs ago… But not the point. This particular design idea won’t make you ditch your brand colours. Instead, try breaking up the phrase into a few shorter blocks and type them separately – partly in capital letters, partly without a background and a word or two in “Neon’, of course (this font makes me wanna vomit when overused. I mean, can anyone really read that?! But in small proportions it’s even kinda cool). Now combine them in a stylish ‘magazine headers’ manner.

Don’t think this torture of a ve-e-ery slow writing ends with a previous paragraph. The thing is, patience can create really beautiful and unique results. Forget splitting the phrase, we’re now splitting the words! Type one letter, pick a background and paste it on your photo or video. Now type the second letter of this word, pick the background and place it next to the first one. Continue til’ you finish the word and enjoy the funky cool look of separate blocks creating one word. Write ‘Happy Birthday’ that way and draw a thin line between the blocks, using one of Stories’ pens – here you go, a cute celebration sign. P.S. As you can tell from a photo below, my patience was enough to only finish ‘Happy’. I did all I could, I swear.

• 

• 

If you’re only just writing a few words, try typing the same phrase twice, colour it differently (only letters, no background this time), make sure both phrases are of the same size and place one text over the other, slightly moving it to any direction – now you have a beautiful text with a shadow!

My favourite trick is what I call ‘rainbow texts’. It’s a touch trickier than shadows (using both hands at once? what?!) and requires a bit of training but good things take time they say, right? Type a short phrase (ideally if it’s just one line) and tap it to ‘Select all’. Now fetch palette with extra colours and start moving your finger from one colour to another, while at the same time moving another hand over the text so that you’re de-selecting it letter by letter and watch text getting coloured in a soft gradient!

But let’s leave the colours aside. Do you know how to fix that one very annoying thing with Stories texts? I’m talking about fonts without the choice of alignment, of course. It’s so easy it almost makes me laugh every time I do it. Just type your text and quckly swipe the finger above it – you’ll see the text following your finger and aligning to the left or right. Make sure you don’t have any parts of your text highlighted, or trick won’t work.

Playing with pens on Stories

It’s not only text you can experiment with. To make my Stories stand out, I love using pens and brushes. When repeated frequently, a small doodle in your signature colour next to your text or on one side of your video will create that recognisable brand style you’re looking for. I remember, @thenourishingbaker used to draw tiny dots all over her videos, using the neon pen (third one) – it creates such a magical, fairy tale vibe! @christinamacpherson is the most gorgeous creature on Earth uses this trick quite often – go follow her for inspiration!

If you’re about to reveal something cool and long-awaited, let’s say a big giveaway with the prize to die for, you might tease your followers by showing only a part of photo or video first. How to do that? It’s easier than it sounds! Pick a brush and colour (the left brush is a classic one, second to the left is transparent) and hold your finger on your screen for a while until the entire screen gets coloured. Now pick eraser and ‘reveal’ parts of the image – just one corner or random circles here and there, or maybe you can even write your name in thin cursive (that is if you still remember how to write in cursive)?

Pen can also customise backgrounds of your reposts. Whenever you share the latest feed update to your Stories (which you 100% should be doing!) or share someone’s post, tap the pen, pick the colour and hold your finger on the screen to change the colour of the background. Same process – different outcome. Fun!

• 

• 

By the way, you can also make an animated background for your feed reposts! Find round smiley face in the top right corner and click on it. Now choose filter you like – hearts, sparkles and things like that are the best, face filters just won’t work without an actual face – and click anywhere on a screen to leave filters screen. Admire the wonderful result. I don’t have this feature on my personal account (ouch, Instagram!) but can do it on every.freakin.single. account I’m managing for other brands, so I bet you can too!

You’re probably using ‘Day of the week’ sticker every now and then (in case you’re not – it’s approx. the second screen of stickers tap, right next to ‘lit’ and ‘yassss’). And you might even know already that by taping on it, the original version changes into a white stencil. But have you ever thought of quickly colouring it with a pen? It creates a cool and unexpected effect that attracts attention – we have all seen this sticker many times before but we’ve never seen it looking LIKE THAT. Now it’s not just an average ‘Wednesday’, it’s your original, BRAND-COLOURED ‘Wednesday’.

Next level

Question I get asked the most (ok, second most popular after where does my accent come from) is how do people post several photos on one Stories slide. In other words, how do you create a photo collage? There are tons of apps with beautiful templates (Unfold and Canva are my #1) but like with many other cool things, YOU DON’T ACTUALLY NEED ANY APP AT ALL! All you need is:

• pick one photo to use as a background in Stories
• go to ‘Photos’ on your smartphone and copy the photo you want to place above it (using the arrow at the bottom left corner)
• go back to your Stories and click on ‘Aa’ as if you were going to write something
• click ‘Paste’.

Voila! You can now move and resize pasted image and add more pics. Or better yet, save background+1 image to your ‘Photos’ folder, post it to Stories, now fetch saved image and paste one more photo, save it and post to Stories. Keep on doing that to create an effect of photos appearing one by one as if it was a video-presentation.

• 

• 

When you want to post things you’re grateful for today or ingredients list for your signature dish or a list of products you’ve used for today’s makeup – I think, you get the idea, if you need to post ANY LIST AT ALL – instead of posting a whole lot of text on one photo, try this idea. Pick your photo, type the first line/ingredient, save this Story to your Photos, type in the second line, save again, go on until you reach the last line. Now ‘Discard’ current Story and simply post all saved photos one by one (‘Select multiple’ will save you time) – you’ll get a series of Stories, where text appears line by line as if it was animated.

Oh, and here is another one. I bet this one will give your followers to think, all right. Open an image you want to post on Stories, pick a pen and your signature colour, SWITCH ON SCREEN RECORDING (sensing something special already?) and start writing whatever you want as long as it fits into 15 seconds – ‘Have a great weekend!’ is a perfect one – stop screen recording, go to Photos, click to ‘Edit’ your video (you need to get rid of that final sec that gives away your pre-recorded secret) and here you have a cool Story that looks like you’re drawing something right now. Just make sure you don’t pause for too long between the letters, or all the tools will pop up and reveal your secret. Tell me you didn’t like this one!

As you see, there are so many ways to get creative with your Stories on Instagram! All these tricks don’t even require downloading any extra apps but will still make your Stories stand out. I’m pretty sure, once you start experimenting and playing with styles and combinations, you’ll discover a lot more unique solutions. In my book, I’m also shareing my favourite apps to take your Stories game to a whole new level – editing, templates, video montage, special effects, my-oh-my there is so much more to learn about Instagram in general and Stories in particular! And the more you learn, the more exciting the process of creating Stories gets. Don’t forget to sign up to theStyleJungle email below to receive discount code for the upcoming book.

---

Liked this post? Pin it: