Instagram has stolen the hearts of many social media users. Facebook is overwrought with parents, grandparents (and, hey, that’s cool and all, but sometimes you want a separate space), people from high school you absolutely don’t care about… and advertisements. Seriously, how many times have I thought “What friend of mine is it that keeps posting these stories about Nexium, and then I realize it’s all “Suggested Content.” Today’s teens (and let’s be honest, the greater populace) are drawn to something simpler. Instagram’s sole purpose is to share fun and cool pictures with your friends and to like, comment or just swipe past theirs at your own discretion and convenience.
You can put as little or as much thought into your Instagram as you like. If you’re like me, you might want to put a little more effort into your profile for professional reasons. But as creative and artsy as Instagram gets with their filters, the profile scene lacks in those departments. It looks really nice and less generic if you can find a way for your bio to “stand out above the crowd.” (If your recognized that The Goofy Movie reference, congratulations: you’re from the 90s and you had a childhood.) And so, here is a simple way to center your Instagram bio. You’ll have to ask your therapist or yogi how to center your life.
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
How to Center Your Instagram Bio
We here at Appamatix are no strangers to Instagram. Seriously, we spend a lot of our time there. Before we begin, just be aware that your Instagram experience — which is to say, the way you can interact with Instagram and the number and kinds of things you can do with your Instagram account — varies depending on how you’re accessing it. The menus and options in on the website are going to be slightly different from how you’d accomplish the same things on a phone, through the app. And some people haven’t ever really worked with their bios (or haven’t touched their bios since they first signed up). So, first you need to know how to get a hold of your Instagram bio — without being able to do that, the rest of this article is pretty much meaningless.
Here’s a breakdown of what to do on your phone:
Change Instagram bio on iPhone and Android:
- Open the Instagram app on your phone. Look for the little person icon at the bottom and tap on it.
- You’ll see an option to Edit your Profile, tap on it.
- You will now be able to edit your name, username, you can change or add a website along with an bio. You will also have the option to change your privacy information.
- Finally, when you’re done you can tap Done on iPhone or Save on Android.
And here’s what you need to do if you want to work on your profile from the convenience of your computer.
Change Instagram bio on PC or Mac:
- If you’re on a computer and would rather change your profile on that, it’s super easy, just head over to this address: https://instagram.com/accounts/edit/# which will take you directly to your Instagram profile.
- If you’re not already logged in, do so; it will prompt you.
- From there you can change your Name, Email, Username, Phone Number, Gender, Bio, and Website by clicking on your username on the top righthand corner.
Now that you’ve found the bio page and have decided on a clever and snarky bio, your ready to center.
How To Center Your Instagram Bio
So, you’ve seen some other people’s bios and they look a hot mess! Or they look really clean and sleek. I mean, look there’s only so much you can do with the bio. We highly suggest short descriptive words especially for this method. The bio can look sloppy if you clutter it with too much information all jam-packed in the tiny space provided.
Now, for the centering trick, you don’t need any special knowledge of the app; it’s actually fairly simple. You just have to trick the app into believing there are spaces but that app’s momma didn’t raise no fool; hence the need for the trick. Follow these steps to center your bio.
- Head over to your bio page as previously discussed.
- From there, click to edit your bio.
- This is the tricky part, if you just type in spaces it will automatically delete them when you save. You have to copy and paste spaces into the bio for it to maintain the space. That’s where you’re tricking Instagram. Therefore, copy these spaces and paste them before your bio: *⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀* Remember only copy the space between the asterisks.
- You may want to hit save and check your bio a few times to make sure it looks centered.
- That’s it, now your bio will maintain the extra spaces and stay centered. It didn’t take any special formatting, zero knowledge of HTML, and you didn’t even need to use anything more robust than the phone app. It’s just a series of spaces. This might sound obvious, but it isn’t really. A lot of websites with text entry have things configured so that duplicate spaces will be deleted, or at least won’t render. So you can space and space and space and space and it will never show up. That’s not the case here, and so this is something we can exploit.
TIP: Centering looks better if you use short sentences that are stacked as opposed to a long sentence or a string of sentences.
TIP again: Want another way to center your bio? Simply open up Microsoft Word or any other text editing software and from there you can write your bio and center it. After centering your bio, just copy and paste it from the text editing software over to your bio and it will maintain all the formatting.
How to Include Instagram Bio Spaces
You may not be wild about centering your bio but you just want to add some spaces to spread out the bio a bit and make it easier to read or flow a bit better. Or you wanna be wacky and have random words all over the place. The trick with this is you can’t just add spaces when editing the bio and expect it to work normally, this is because Instagram has put in parameters to remove all unnecessary spaces to conserve space and make things simpler. It’s that same design philosophy Apple has had so much success with: take away features and versatility in the interests of what’s best for you.
However, sometimes it’s better to include those spaces to make the page more readable and appealing to the eye. Maybe you don’t have much to say and hate for it all to be crammed together. Or maybe you’re a poet very much in love with e. e. cummings. Either way, you want to space things out how you want to space things out. And after hours of spacing and tabbing and performing every typographical trick you know, it keeps reverting to the default.
Well, don’t throw your device out the window; we have the solution.
To do this you will need to copy and paste spaces from somewhere else in order for Instagram to honor where you’ve included spaces (this is why the trick above works!).
Yes, that’s really it.
Now, you may be saying, “I’ve put in every kind of space I know how! I’ve even tried typing them with my elbows! How can some fancy, imported space do something that no amount of domestic spaces can accomplish.”
If you weren’t saying that, I’m just going to assume that you were.
In fact, you’re better off just caving and saying it. This article can’t proceed until you’ve said your line.
…
Thank you.
Well, yes! That is a ridiculous proposition on the surface (although you were probably more forceful than the topic really deserves). And counterintuitive as it all is, it really all comes down to the way web browsers (and Instagram’s internal protocols) understand typography.
Basically, if you put the space in yourself, it will aways truncate it down. However, if you copy and paste the space from a different source, it acts as a character that can’t be seen. As in, there is a character there but Instagram just doesn’t recognize it so it shows the character as a blank. Pretty neat, right?
To do this, just copy the following blank spaces and insert them wherever you want in your bio to maintain a space. Of course, you don’t need to do this with normal spaces between words as Instagram recognizes these.
Use as much or as little of the spaces below that you want, just make sure you don’t copy and paste the arrows. If you don’t want to use as many of the spaces that are below, just copy a portion or copy it all then delete them once they are over on your Instagram bio.
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→ ←
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So, that’s kind of it.
If you have any questions about anything that we’ve covered here, or if you have something that you’d like to add (such as an alternate method that has worked for you in the past) feel free to share it in the comments; we’d love to see it.
What we wouldn’t love to see are endless photos of all your meals.