You can labor for hours designing your own templates for instagram in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Or, you can pay a graphic designer to create custom branded social media templates. There are businesses that would benefit from unique, one of a kind branding and should spend the extra money. But, most of us just want a good presentation without spending a fortune, or anything at all for that matter.
I went on a hunt for as many quality free instagram templates as I could find and I compiled them into this post for you.
I’m going to share some premium templates from Creative Market too. There are some top-notch designers selling gorgeous templates for Photoshop, Illustrator and Canva at a nominal price. It’s been worth the small price for me as I use them as cover images on the free presets I make and give away on this site.
BEST FREE TEMPLATES FOR THE INSTAGRAM APP
CANVA
Canva is a graphic design website that gives you the tools to design, save and download custom graphics. You can design from scratch or modify one of their thousands of ready made graphics with your own text and images.
Canva provides many free photos, vector images, fonts, icons and more. You can also upload your own images and use them in your designs. The beauty of Canva, in addition to its simplicity, is that it’s free.
Many graphic designers have caught on to the Canva trend and sell sets of matching graphics that you can edit yourself in Canva. You get the benefit of premium design at a really small price.
PREVIEW
Preview is an app for both iPhone and Android that makes it easy to design your feed, find relevant hashtags, view traffic analytics and more. They offer a free puzzle feed template for Instagram and give instructions for editing the template in Canva.
As an aside, this app comes with over 70 free filters, photo editing tools, and lists of popular hashtags in your niche.
CRELLO
Crello is similar to Canva. A free account will give you access to 6,000 design templates, 4,000 photos and will allow you to upload 1 custom font and 100 photos to your account. Like Canva, they do have some additional features for paid accounts, but you likely won’t need them.
Since Crello use the same file type as Canva, you can use both platforms with any Canva compatible file.
FREEPIK
Freepik offers a number of free social media templates, including Instagram specific designs. Unlike Canva and Crello, they don’t offer online dating tools. But, if you do use Adobe software you can use these feed templates. There are templates in .PSD format and some in vector .EPS format but you can sort by file type.
A lot of the designs are a bit cheap looking to me, but I can see some of them working well for some purposes.
SNAPPA
Snappa is a smaller, simpler site with a lot of free downloads. There is no online editing either. But, these designs are better than Freepik overall and I can see many of them working well for marketing.
HOOTSUITE
Hootsuite is actually a social media marketing company. However, they do have a collection of free instagram story templates. It’s a small collection but well designed.
FLOTHEMES
Flothemes sells elegant wordpress themes for wedding photographers. But, they do have a free set of 29 Instagram stories that are as beautiful as a premium design. The entire set is meant to be used together to maintain a cohesive look.
PREMIUM INSTAGRAM FEED TEMPLATES
CREATIVE MARKET
If you want your Instagram presentation to look especially stylish and want to stand out as a brand, I would recommend perusing Creative Market. Every shop goes through a rigorous application process before being allowed to sell and many shops are denied in the process. I now buy all of my digital resources on Creative Market and have compiled a huge library of templates and tools for Photoshop like brushes, styles, graphics and textures.
There are nearly 5,000 products in the Instagram category alone. I bought a set made specifically for Canva once simply because it was beautiful and there wasn’t a PSD version for Photoshop available. I prefer to and usually do use Photoshop for editing, but editing in Canva was very easy and I got the result I was looking for. Be sure to read the product descriptions as some templates are only compatible with Photoshop or Canva and not both.
Here is a collection of some of my favorite sets of Canva design templates for Instagram. I love that most of these sets have matching graphics for both the square format and the story format, which is rectangular. Instagram puzzles and animated graphics can really make your feed stand out in a beautiful or fun way as well.
ETSY
Etsy finally caught on that tons of people were selling digital downloads on their site several years ago. In the early days a customer would place an order and then get their file when the seller got around to emailing it. Some shops even charged extra to guarantee the file within 24 hours. 24 hours! Silly.
They’ve since set things up so that files can be uploaded directly to a listing and then digital purchases can be downloaded immediately. Much to the relief of both shop owners and frustrated customers.
For the longest time most of the graphic design on Etsy was pretty subpar or simply dated. But, since they made their platform digital download friendly a huge wave of digital shops have shown up on Etsy and the quality has improved. Like Creative Market, you can download square, story, grid, puzzle and animated templates for for your Instagram feed.
Bear in mind that most of the shops on Etsy are run by women. Most of the customers are women too. You’ll find lots of pale pink and other pastels on Etsy.
In conclusion, wether you are happy using free templates or want something a little more special you’re sure to find something you can live with, or even love.
Hello! My name is Rachael Towne and I am the creator of Presets Galore which was acquired by Imaginated.com. The presets I make reflect my love of dramatic imagery and film. Each preset is tested on many photos and finely adjusted to give gorgeous results with a wide variety of images.