I’ll be the first to admit that the problem was partly my content. The next time I posted – a shot from a Friendsgiving in my apartment – I completely forgot about my new lifestyle and shared the picture without cropping it onto the appropriate background. One was a picture of a neon “No Dancing” sign in my favorite neighborhood bar and the other was a picture of my “I Voted” sticker. I did it for a total of two posts before I gave up. For all of a week in November, 2017 I decided I’d join the legion of identical looking but oh-so-satisfying Instagrammers who takes the time to use a third-party app and give each of my photos over the aforementioned white borders. I yearned for both of those things.Īnd so I tried to change. I also imagine there’s a delicious smugness that comes from having such a feed, too. Seeing all the images zoomed out you realize the grid matters as much, if not more, than every individual post. There’s a satisfying calm that washes over me whenever I land on an Instagram profile from somebody who has taken the time and put in the effort to make it look nice as a whole. I never use the same filter settings to ensure the photos are all muted and faded in the same way.

There are too many back to back photos with particular friends. Some are cropped into the ubiquitous Instagram square shape, while others are wide portraits. The color scheme is all over the place a photo of me in a pool on the last, good day of summer is seated next to a #TBT of my friends and I dressed in crazy costumes working college orientation which is perched atop a black and white shot from a Taylor Swift concert.

I don’t post at the most ideal time for likes. There’s no unifying theme behind my posts.

What does your Instagram grid look like? In my experience, there are only two options: A unified aesthetic experience - an endless sea of perfectly curated photos in homogenous colors that all seem to blur together as though they were all shot on the exact same date and time in the same place, each of those photos given a thick white border that runs together, so when you look at them all together the photos appears as though they’ve been collaged atop a clean page - and, well, a mess.

Photo grid instagram