We've all poured our hearts into brilliant content, hit publish, and then received 2 likes on a carousel post that took 2 hours to design. If you’re feeling frustrated with your IG content lately, you’re not alone!
And if you want to get out of this rut, here's the uncomfortable truth: no one is reading your brilliant content if your design is working against you. It's not the algorithm, it's not your ideas, and it's definitely not because you don't have anything valuable to say. It could just be how it looks!
In this episode, we're calling out the "content over design" myth and breaking down why your posts have about 1.5 seconds to stop the scroll and how to make sure they do. You'll walk away understanding how to use design as a strategic tool to finally get your genius ideas the attention they deserve.
Let me kick this off with something that's going to feel uncomfortable: the whole "as long as your content is good enough, the design doesn't matter" narrative is kind of bullshit.
I get it. We've all been sold this idea that if you just show up consistently, provide value, write killer captions and clever carousel copy, the followers, shares, and sales will naturally follow. But it's not just the ideas, words, or even the algorithm that matters.
It's how it looks.
And I know that feels superficial, but the whole point of design is to give your message a stage to perform on, one that invites your audience in and earns you those first crucial few seconds. The chance to be read, liked, saved, or shared.
The design is the wrapper around your value. And no matter how gold the content is, if the wrapper looks off, most people won't care. It's as simple as that.
Instagram and carousels in particular can feel like such a chore. But it's not because you don't have anything to say — you do. You're writing email sequences, Substacks, blog posts, newsletters, podcast episodes, website copy. You're teaching, coaching, leading. You've got so much substance.
So why the hell is a carousel harder than all of that combined?
It's because carousels require a slightly different way of thinking. You're not just writing — you're directing attention. You're deciding what deserves to be big, what gets to whisper, what gets to take up space, what gets to fade into the background. You're not just sharing words and value, you're choreographing how it's received on the other end.
But no one ever tells you that part. And so you're left thinking, "maybe I'm not cut out for content" when really your content was never the problem. Your design was.
When I say design, I don't just mean pretty fonts and color palettes. I mean visual hierarchy, legibility, flow, emotional tone, cohesion… The feeling your audience gets the second your post hits their screen.
And when that part is off, it doesn't matter how smart your ideas are, people will just scroll right past you. They won't hear what you actually have to say.
So if you've been showing up and not getting results, I don't want you to get scared and give up. I want you to redesign how you show up, so that you can stop crossing your fingers and hoping people care whenever you post something, and start designing content that actually makes them care.
Now, I'm not saying it's all about the design either, because a pretty post with a nice quote isn't going to do much for your brand or business. What I am saying is that ignoring the role design plays in helping you leverage your content and better communicate your ideas is not a smart business move.
I understand the appeal of the whole "as long as your content's valuable, design isn't important" message, especially when you're juggling a million things at the same time in your business. If design doesn't matter, that's one thing off your plate, right?
This anti-design narrative is very comforting. Because if design doesn't matter, then you don't have to challenge yourself to be creative and come up with new ways to market your brand. If design doesn't matter, then you don't have to confront how overwhelming your Canva dashboard feels when all you want is to just post that genius idea you had in the shower.
It almost gives you permission to ignore an entire skill set that feels out of reach and that you just don't feel like you're good enough to master.
But imagine if we did that with all the other skill sets — with writing copy, then what? We wouldn't write captions or newsletters or any marketing for that matter. Or if we felt that way about finances, what? We just wouldn't care how much money we make and spend.
That isn't a business. That's a hobby.
It's that mindset of just ignoring what you kind of know in your heart isn't doing so well that's keeping you invisible. And when it comes to content design specifically, it's precisely when you put a little bit more effort in it, when you dare to do something different, when you make the time to play and experiment and just think outside the box that you start reaping those results.
You just have to stop doing what you've always done just because it's easy.
Good content deserves a good design that makes it more visible. Think about all the other areas of life, not just online business. A Michelin star meal doesn't really have the same appeal if you serve it on a paper plate. Would you wrap a luxury perfume in cling film and expect people to pay a thousand euros for it?
No, because presentation influences perception. That's the whole deal with branding in general.
No matter how good of a professional you are, if there are no visual cues that indicate to me as a potential client your values, your personality, your approach, then instead of you being my no-brainer choice, I'm just gonna end up comparing you with everyone else that looks similar and probably end up choosing whoever's the cheapest one out of the bunch.
Now, I know that the flip side to this content design coin is that it can feel over-designed, overproduced, fake, curated. And you're not an influencer, you're not a lifestyle creator — you're a small business owner. So it needs to feel real because we've all seen those ultra slick templated brands that feel like they were designed by ChatGPT.
But we cannot continue to confuse realness with carelessness, or authenticity with inconsistency, or being relatable with being palatable.
You don't need cinema level production value to be taken seriously. But you also can't give yourself the luxury of not caring about the aesthetic at all. You do need to care.
There's a whole field of psychology around visual hierarchy, colour psychology, cognitive ease that proves this. But you don't need to go that deep. You just need to understand that people trust what they can process easily.
Do you remember the last carousel you read? If you do, there's a reason why. If you don't, there's also a reason why.
Let's zoom in for a second on the moment your content actually meets your audience. Most likely, your audience just opened Instagram while waiting for their coffee, or while lying on the couch with a face mask on, or pretending to listen to a Zoom call (who has never done that?), or while the TV show they have on drones in the background.
And so they're scrolling. They're not consciously deciding which content to engage with. They're not pulling out a notebook and saying, "what can I learn today?" They're reacting instinctively, subconsciously, rapid-fire style.
Because we're not looking for more to read, for more to consume necessarily. `We're looking for something to stop the scroll.
And your post has about 1.5 seconds to do that.
Before anyone even reads your caption, they've already formed a micro opinion based on the visual appearance and presence of that post. They've already made the snap judgment of "worth my time" versus "let's find something else."
So if that first graphic, that first visual doesn't stop them, they're gone. On to the next thing. If your text is too hard to read, they give up. They're not going to bother squinting. I don't bother squinting. You don't bother squinting. They is all of us as clients, as content consumers, as purchasers.
When something is confusing or blends away into the other 15 carousels I've just scrolled past, I'm not going to remember it. I'm just going to keep sliding, keep swiping.
And again, it has nothing to do with the value of each individual content piece or how smart the insight is or how hard you worked on that post. It's just that our brains are processing hundreds of signals per second and the brain loves a shortcut. We're lazy like that.
Here are a few key things your audience is subconsciously scanning for — and that you can look for when designing a carousel:
Can you guide their eyes with bold headlines? Do I know where to look first? Is it obvious? Is there enough spacing so as not to muddle the words around?
Don't make everything big and bold because then nothing really is. Visual hierarchy at the end of the day is just about directing focus and helping the audience understand the structure of your idea.
I cannot tell you how simple this is and yet how many people fail at it. In an effort to cram as much information into a single carousel slide, they end up just making the text so teeny tiny no one's ever going to bother reading it.
Make sure there's enough contrast between your background and your text. You don't want a yellow background with white text or a black background with dark grey text. Don't use way too many fonts. I always advise having a job for each font — there's a font that's a headline, a font that's the paragraph, one that's cute little remarks basically. That's it. You don't need more than two or three fonts max per slide.
Also, you could have the most poetic, mic-drop message in the world — if your font size is microscopic or your colours are too pale, I didn't read that. If you want to make your content effortless to consume and share, you need to make it effortless to read.
That's why I said that design in and of itself, in a vacuum container, isn't enough either. You can design a pretty post on Monday and another pretty post on Wednesday — if they have nothing to do with each other, it's not really reinforcing your overall brand, right?
You want someone to instantly recognise your style before they get a chance to see your username. That's why branding is important, and having those assets before starting to design content is so crucial.
The content needs to feel connected to the rest of your brand — from your offers, your vibe, your voice. Because if people don't associate your content with you and your brand and what you have to sell, is there really a point in sharing it?
Yes, it is possible to consistently design good-looking carousels without butchering your ideas. You don't need a million templates or a professional designer.
You just need to treat design as a part of your message, not an afterthought.
Because if your content is already valuable (and I know it is), the only thing standing between you and a post that gets shared, saved, remembered, and brings people into your world is the way that you're delivering it.
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✦ Check out Xanthe Appleyard’s post
✦ THE COLOUR CIRCLE: Bring the Canva design you’ve been (over)fiddling with for hours
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This episode was co-produced with Adrienne Cruz.
Over the last 5 years as a Brand & Marketing Designer, I’ve helped freaks like us design their unconventional brands so they can step onto the main stage & own their weird. Because if you wanted to be, look or sound like everyone else, you wouldn’t be where you are today. Now it’s your turn.
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