How to design outside of the Instagram square

thinking about and executing a full picture design

I love social media and I hate social media (the age old declaration- maybe you can relate?) I think that the positives can outweigh the negatives on a good day, and I really do try to focus on those, for the most part. I also think that it’s easy to toss around the phrase “social media” without really considering the medium- it’s mostly used to denote anything that’s shared online these days, right? In a day and age where everything is interactive and we’re encouraged to share and voice our opinions on every single thing online, what is social media even, anyway? But I digress- we’ll save that existentialism for another day. For the purposes of this post, though, let’s focus on one social media platform: Instagram. Two of the many reasons I love Instagram is that it can be great for building a community, and it is fantastic for gathering and bookmarking inspiration. I use it for my job as an interior designer and I use it as a real life person who likes to save pretty things that jump out at her. However, one of the very specific downsides I want to talk about today is exactly what the headline of this post says: Instagram can sometimes force us to view real living and breathing spaces and places through the lens of a cut and cropped square, leaving me to ponder what lies outside of that border, anyway? (insert Carrie Bradshaw smoking a cigarette and looking pensively at her computer meme here)