how to make your Instagram grid look more aesthetic.

Earlier this year, I decided to start an Instagram page (you can find me over on @arteri.creative), primarily to showcase aesthetic vibes and objects.

However, one thing I quickly realised is that it’s surprisingly hard to stretch a certain aesthetic over an entire grid or across all of your content. So, I started looking at what other people were doing and stumbled across one of my favourite creatives on Instagram: @jakefov.

He’s a car enthusiast who drives a Porsche Boxster with other petrolheads around the Scottish Highlands and often brings back a lot of extremely good-looking photos.

Everything is desaturated. Not always black and white, but just nothing bright or punchy. Every shot has one clear focal point with everything else falling away around it, a lighthouse through a windscreen, a turbo badge, a wing mirror in the rain. And you never just get the subject on its own. There's always a world around it, the landscape, the weather, the interior framing it.

There's three rules at play: Muted tones, one focal point, subject always inside a wider context. He applies them whether he's shooting a detail or a wide landscape, which is why completely different photos feel like they belong together.

Most grids fall apart because there are no rules like that underneath them. Every post is a fresh decision made on instinct. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and the result is a feed that looks like it belongs to several different people.

So, here’s an exercise for this week:

Pick 3 rules for your posts.

Pull up your three best posts. Look at what's actually the same. Not the vibe, but the specifics. The dominant colours, where the subject sits in the frame, where the light's coming from, and obviously the subjects themselves.

Write down two or three things you can see in all of them. And before you do your next post, check it against those. If it doesn't fit, reshoot or don't post it.

-Arteri.