Despite what you might have heard, curating a compelling Instagram aesthetic in 2025 is essential for content creators who want to grow their audience and strengthen their personal brand. Your Instagram aesthetic is more than just pretty pictures—it’s a visual representation of your identity, message, and values. In other words, it’s your personal brand. It dictates how old and new followers perceive you and influences engagement rates, collaborations, and brand partnerships.

With the ever-changing Instagram algorithm and the rising demand for authenticity, just following trends won’t cut it anymore. Instead, you need a well-thought-out strategy that combines creativity, consistency, and strategic content planning all wrapped up in a personal brand that reflects YOU!

In this guide, I share 10 expert-backed strategies to help you create a strong Instagram aesthetic in 2025. I’ll also share examples of Instagram aesthetics by creators to help communicate the importance of visual identity and style.

1. Define Your Personal Brand Identity

Before diving into color schemes and editing styles, take a step back and define your personal brand. A personal brand is the foundation of a strong Instagram aesthetic because it defines your identity, creates consistency, and builds trust. It helps attract your ideal audience, guides content creation, and increases brand collaboration opportunities by easily communicating alignment. 

To establish your personal brand identity, ask yourself:

• What are your core values?
• What message do you want to communicate?
• Who is your target audience? (Down to the fine details like age, where they live, and their likes/dislikes)
• What emotions do you want people to feel when they visit your profile?

According to Forbes, 77% of consumers prefer to support brands that align with their personal values. This applies to content creators and influencers as well. By establishing a clear brand identity, your Instagram aesthetic will feel cohesive and intentional, making it easier to attract and retain followers.

2. Choose a Consistent Color Palette

Now, there’s a lot of conversation about how cohesive feeds on Instagram are outdated. However, this is not sound advice. Social media gurus will tell you that highly curated feeds are out, and photo dumps are in. But a cohesive color palette helps create a recognizable aesthetic that sets you apart, especially if your goal is to work with brands.

Think about it: If a brand like Dior is going to work with influencers, will they pick someone with a simple, more rustic, straight-from-the-camera roll feed like Bekah’s? Or will they pick someone like Taramilktea, who has an elegant, luxurious, and romantic aesthetic?

While trends shouldn’t dictate your color palette, I wanted to highlight that 2025 color trends lean towards earthy tones, muted pastels, and minimalist black-and-white aesthetics, but your choice should align with your personal brand.

If you’re at a loss for creating a color palette, you can use tools like Adobe Color, Coolors, or Canva’s color palette generator to find a combination that reflects your brand and stick with it across your feed, stories, and reels.

3. Use High-Quality Visuals (Even if You’re Not a Photographer)

Quality matters. Instagram is a visual-first platform, and blurry or poorly lit photos won’t attract engagement. However, you don’t need a professional camera to achieve high-quality images. With advancements in smartphone photography, apps like Lightroom Mobile and Tezza can help enhance image quality effortlessly.

Here’s a quick checklist to run your images and videos through:

• Is your content well-lit and properly exposed?
• Is your image/video high-resolution?
• Have you edited it with a consistent style?
• Have you cropped and framed your thumbnail thoughtfully?

4. Plan Your Feed Layout

Your Instagram grid should be visually appealing at first glance. Many successful content creators use planning tools like Planoly to arrange their feed before posting. But you don’t need to sign up for another platform to do this. You can simply create an album on your iPhone photos app to drag and drop photos to preview your feed.

By strategically placing images with different compositions, colors, and textures, you can maintain a balanced and aesthetically pleasing feed. 

Here’s a quick guideline to help keep your feed balanced and intriguing:

• Alternate light and dark tones
• Mix your close-ups and wider shots so you don’t have too much of one in a row
• Repeat patterns or themes

5. Keep Instagram Stories in Mind

While your feed should have a well-thought-out and cohesive look, Instagram Stories allow for more flexibility. However, to maintain brand consistency, you’ll want to stick to the same fonts, colors, and general style. 

This helps reinforce your personal brand without making your Stories feel overly curated. Instagram’s built-in customization tools make it easy to create engaging and branded Stories without extensive editing.

6. Develop a Signature Editing Style

Editing plays a crucial role in establishing a unique Instagram aesthetic. It’s why a lot of large creators use custom Lightroom presets and manual adjustments to achieve a polished but natural look.

I know editing might feel intimidating, so here’s a quick reference guide for editing elements to pay attention to:

• Brightness & Contrast: Keep a balanced exposure to maintain a clean look.
• Saturation & Hue Adjustments: Enhance colors without making them look unnatural.
• Sharpening & Clarity: Ensure details stand out without over-processing.

7. Master the Art of Captions and Emojis

While visuals attract users, captions and emojis help retain them. Aesthetics alone won’t boost engagement if your captions don’t add value or resonate with your audience. As for emojis, they’re the text-based equivalent of your Instagram aesthetic. It might seem silly, but knowing which emojis align with your personal brand and which ones don’t is important.

And if eventually, you outsource some of your content creation and caption writing to a social media manager, telling them which emojis to use and not use will be important.

While I can dedicate an entire post to writing engaging captions, here are some best practices to go by:

• Deliver value! Make sure that your caption is worth your audience’s time.
• Include calls-to-action (CTAs) like “Save this for later” or “Tell me your thoughts,” encouraging them to interact with you and your community.
• Maintain a conversational tone that aligns with your personal brand.

8. Stay Authentic and Showcase Your Personality

Authenticity is a buzzword in the online space. So many misinterpret this as a means to not edit your content. However, authenticity should be aligned with your personality and brand. While polished visuals matter, they should not come at the cost of realness. 

So how do you convey authenticity seamlessly into your Instagram aesthetic? You can do so by:

• Sharing behind-the-scenes content.
• Posting unfiltered moments in Stories.
• Showing the creative process behind your posts.
• Engaging genuinely with your audience.

9. Align Your Aesthetic with Content Strategy

Your Instagram aesthetic should complement your overall content strategy. Think beyond individual posts and create themes for your content. Some of the most common ones you’ll see out there include:

• Educational Content: Tutorials, how-to guides, tips.
• Inspirational Content: Quotes, success stories, motivational posts.
• Entertainment Content: Personal stories, relatable posts, day in the life.

In my brand new free class, I walk you through my proprietary content strategy, the G.A.I.N framework. This simplifies and explains in depth the 4 types of content you need to focus on. You can click right here to watch the free class!

The key is to create a balance between aesthetic appeal and valuable content that keeps your audience coming back for more.

10. Track Analytics and Adjust Accordingly

Aesthetic consistency doesn’t mean being stagnant. Monitor performance metrics to see what resonates most with your audience and refine your strategy accordingly.

Here are a few important metrics to track to make sure your content is striking the right chords:

• Engagement rate (likes, comments, shares, saves)
• Story views and interactions
• Follower growth rate

Instagram Insights is your best friend. It provides in-depth analytics that helps optimize your aesthetic and strategy for maximum impact.

Wrapping Up

A strong Instagram aesthetic is more than just a visually appealing feed—it’s a strategic, evolving representation of your personal brand. In 2025, staying ahead means blending authenticity with high-quality visuals, engaging formats, and an intentional brand message. By implementing these expert-backed strategies, you’ll be able to craft a standout presence on Instagram that attracts the right audience and enhances your brand’s influence.