How Influencers Are Creating Personalized Covers For Instagram Story Highlights

Whenever Instagram releases a new feature, a common pattern occurs: Users play with said feature; someone adopts a stylish approach; and other people catch on and imitate it until it goes mainstream.

This is the process that's beginning to happen with Stories Highlights, a tool Instagram launched this past December that lets you save past Stories to your profile. Many users categorize these Highlights: There might be one collection of food-related Stories posts, another for shopping, and a third for travel. For each Highlight, you have an option to select a cover image, which will appear on your profile, in a small circle above your feed posts.

The default for this cover image is the Story in that Highlight that you posted first. So, if you're including Story posts from January 5 and 6, the first one to go up on January 5 would appear as your cover photo, although you can always select another Story post from the Highlight to take its place.

But if you scroll through the Highlights on the profiles of influencers such as Marianna Hewitt and Jessica Graf, you'll see stylized logos as each of the cover images. These are created using third-party apps, not Instagram, and offer an opportunity to give your Highlights a more cohesive look.

Ahead, a complete guide to four apps you can use to create personalized Highlight cover images of your own.