Design a Mock Social Media Feed

Designing a Social Media Feed – System

We love creating a social media mock feed, specifically Instagram, because it’s the perfect way to see your brand come together in a practical, visual way. This exercise helps you audit fonts, colours, imagery, and graphic devices all in one space. Through the process, you might backtrack and experiment further with fonts, colour, or imagery treatments.

Graphic Devices

When developing brand guidelines, “graphics” doesn’t mean picking every icon or illustration upfront. Instead, you define a visual language—the style and treatment of graphical elements that will guide all design work. Think of it as setting rules for how graphics feel rather than providing every asset.

Guiding questions for your graphic style:

  • Are the lines and shapes curved or straight?
  • Is the style minimalist or decorative?
  • Should graphics be functional, decorative, or both?
  • Do illustrations or icons follow a consistent weight, style, or perspective?
  • How should graphics differ across digital vs print materials?
  • Do the elements reflect the brand’s personality and mood?
  • Should backgrounds or gradients be applied in a consistent way?

You might also define a logo accent. If your logo is complex, consider using just the imagery or a simplified element for small spaces, such as a social media profile image, website footer, or favicon. This keeps the feed cohesive without overusing the full logo.

Video and GIF Considerations

We recommend designing without video or animation initially. Aside from cover images and thumbnails, videos should have a custom PNG thumbnail for consistency.

Important to note colour differentiation which is obvious on the Instagram feed for these file types:

  • PNG: Supports millions of colours and lossless compression, so every pixel matches your original design.
  • Video (MP4/MOV): Uses lossy compression, which can slightly alter colours and reduce sharpness. Ideally, make sure your video has a PNG cover image for your feed.
  • GIF: Limited to 256 colours, means colours often look different! Keep this in mind, since GIF isn’t compatible on socials. If you were to create a video file from a GIF, the colour won’t be true. But, GIF can be great for email where the colour deviation is perhaps less noticable. More on that later.

Steps to Designing Your Feed

  1. Understand your content types: Review past posts and note recurring themes or gaps.
  2. Plan 12 post themes: You don’t need full content yet—just ideas for imagery and styling, and some mock assets such as photos.
  3. Follow the design process:
    • Collate market research
    • Collect your brief
    • Research fonts, colours, and imagery
    • Design thumbnails for each post
  4. Set up your file: Use a Canva template or equivalent to mock up posts.
  5. Experiment: Try colours, typography overlays, graphic devices, and imagery treatments across your post themes. Minimal posts or single images are fine—balance and harmony matter most.
  6. Use cropping creatively: Zoom in or out to create visual interest. Cropping can make ordinary photos feel dynamic and engaging.

Practical Notes

  • Feed preview: Design individual posts in your template to see how they work together visually.
  • Instagram focus: This helps ensure the overarching visual story aligns with your brand.
  • Other platforms:
    • Facebook: More flexible with links and boosted posts.
    • TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube: Apply the same principles; thumbnails should be consistent with brand style.

Creating a mock social media feed is not just fun—it’s practical. It allows you to see your brand shaping up in new directions, experiment safely, and build reusable templates for future posts.