In this instructional video, video strategist Sheryl Plouffe walks viewers through a complete, repeatable workflow for designing, storing, and applying custom-branded highlight icons on Instagram. She starts by showing her existing icons and explains why she wants a more cohesive look. Using Canva (both Pro and free versions), she selects a base template, customizes the background color to match her brand, searches the Elements library for suitable icons, adjusts each icon’s color, size, and centering within a square frame (to account for Instagram’s circular display), and duplicates the process to create a full set of 19 icons. She then exports the icons, uploads them to a dedicated folder in Google Drive, and demonstrates how to access the folder from a smartphone, save each icon to the camera roll, and replace Instagram highlight covers via the Instagram app’s Edit Highlight > Edit Cover flow. Throughout, she emphasizes the importance of a systematic approach—using brand colors, organized cloud storage, and a repeatable design template—to quickly refresh an Instagram profile’s visual identity. She concludes by inviting viewers to follow her on social media for further help.
Chapters
Hey, it's Sheryl Plouffe here, Video Strategist, and I just did something cool that I want to share with you if you are looking to improve the iconography of your Instagram highlight icons. So on the screen, I'm showing you my Instagram icons. Again, I did these on my phone. They're okay, but I'm looking to improve them. So, so basically what I did was This is kind of what I had before, and I have created a new icon that's in my brand colors, as you can see here, and this looks so much better than what I had before. I want to show you how I did this and how you can create a system for yourself to be able to replace all of this iconography as easily as possible. So what you're going to need is obviously you have to have an Instagram account and for this to even matter to you. The second thing is you will need to have a Google Drive. And then you will also need to have Canva. So if you have these tools, then you can go ahead and do this. So this is basically what I did. I went to— now I am using the pro version of Canva. What I did when here was I searched for icon, and then Etsy shop icon came up. So I used this as my background template. I changed the color to my purple brand. Now I have the Pro version, so I do have the brand assets saved, but I believe that if you're even using the, um, the free version of Canva, you can customize this color to whatever you want. You just may not have it as a template. So you get the color in the background, and then what I did was I went over to Elements and I went under Graphics, and then I went down and I searched for icons. Which is here, and I press the All button, all of these different icons come up. You can choose as many of them as you think you might need to represent what you'd like to talk about in the highlights of your Instagram. So for instance, here, you know, you might, um, maybe you like this one, so you can put this in as an icon and then you can go ahead and change the colors. So for example, I might want to choose to change these colors to my brand colors, like— oh, that wouldn't really work. Maybe I'll do black in that case, and maybe white or something like that. You know, so that's more representative of my brand colors overall. And then you just choose the icons that you want and then duplicate each image, delete that one, and choose a new one. So let's say I like this one. I can change this to my brand color, and then you can adjust this to be just a tad smaller and center it to the center of your, your square frame, because remember that this is going to be round when you put this on Instagram on your icons. So you don't want it to reach out to the right, out to the edge, because then you'll have some of that be cut off likely, and you wouldn't in this case maybe see a lot of the purple. Well, this might be not a great example because this icon is round. So then I will keep going and I just keep going and choose, like, say I like this one and I can say, okay, I want that to be my brand color. And then I'm just— and you just keep going. I just readjust this to the center, duplicate, delete, and you go on and on and on. So in my case, what I did was I ended up with a a whole bunch of them. Let me show you. Let's see here. This is the one we were just working on, so I'll just move that to the trash. But this one here, I have like 19 different icons that I've chosen. I don't know if I'm gonna use them all, but I've just created them all in one fell swoop. And then what I do is I can download this and I'm going to select, I'm going to select them all, and I'm going to say done, and then I download them. So now this is downloading to my computer, at which point I go over to my Google Drive, and you can see how I've got them all uploaded here now. But it's really simple. You just go into your Google Drive, you create a folder, So in this case, I have one called Graphics for Social, which is what I, you know, created. So on my Drive, I created Graphics for Social, and then when this is empty, you're going to go over here and click New, File Upload. You're going to find— now it might be in a zip format. You'll have to just double-click the zip file so that all of these open up, and then you go like this, capture them all, and click Open. No, I'm not going to click it because I've already done mine, but you'll click open and then all of those, you'll see a little box on the bottom right that will say uploading, uploading, uploading, and next thing you know, you've got your 19 graphics in here. How this will work then is that you take your phone and you access your Google Drive from your smartphone, and then from there you can download those images to your phone and subsequently to your Instagram through the Instagram app. Okay, so I'm going to mirror my phone now so that you can see what I mean. And what I'll do is I'll go then to my Google Drive and I will find Graphics for Social and you can see that they're all there. So all I have to do now, depending on which one I want to use, is I would actually just click on it. And what I'm gonna do is hold down on the screen itself. It says save to camera roll. So all I did there was I touched the icon with my finger and just kind of held it down for about a second, and then I click OK. So you can see how you would just go back to each of these, hold it down, save it to your camera roll, and you can use them all at once or however you see fit. Then you go back into your Instagram, and I will choose, let's say, this one and I want to improve the icon. I want to use a different icon. So what I will do in this case is, uh, let's see here. I'm going to press on it. I'm going to say Edit Highlight and Edit Cover. So now when I edit the COVID I'm going to go back to choosing a photograph or an icon in this case and say I choose this one, and I'll say done. And now I think— oh, there we go. I can actually pinch it with my fingers to position it a little bit better within the circle. So there you go. So I've just, let's say like that, and I say done, and I click done again. So now when I go back, you can see that the new icon is there at the top. So I've only done 2 of them so far, but now I have the option of going in and really changing all of them up. So that they match my brand better. So I hope that this tutorial has been helpful for you. It's a little bit longer, but I think that this could really be a great benefit to you if you want to improve your branding, your look and feel on Instagram so that everything matches and that you have a more comprehensive or I guess a brand and a look and feel that's more conducive to your overall look that you're going for. So I hope that this is helpful for you. If you want to follow me, hey, do so on Instagram. I'm @cherylplouffe. I'm @cherylplouffe pretty much everywhere on social media, um, here on YouTube and of course Instagram, Facebook, and the rest of it, LinkedIn, Twitter, the whole nine yards. So would love to connect with you on social media. And by all means, if you have any questions, please send them my way. Happy to answer. Love creating systems, and I hope you have a great day. Bye for now.
