How to make an Instagram carousel mockup and present it to a client

What you need

The slides as square images, the caption and the account's handle. Design the slides in your usual tool at 1080 × 1080; this generator shows square slides and crops anything else from the centre. Fakeconvo's Instagram carousel generator is free, needs no account and puts no watermark on the PNG. Your slides stay in your browser and are never uploaded.

Plan the slides before you design them

The cover does most of the work, because it is the only slide most people see. Give it one short, bold promise, like "3 sourdough tips we wish we'd known sooner", and a small "Swipe →" hint. After it, put one idea on each slide, with a large number or heading so people know where they are. End on a slide that tells people what to do next: save the post, visit the shop, read the caption.

Five to eight slides is plenty for most brands; a carousel can hold up to 10. Keep the colours, fonts and margins the same on every slide, and put the handle in the same corner, so the swipe feels like one piece.

Five steps to build the carousel mockup

1. Set up the account. Under People, type the brand's name and its "Handle", and tap the round button before the name to add the logo as the profile picture. Tick "Verified badge" only if the brand really has one.
2. Swap in your slides. On the post, press × on each sample slide, then press "Photo" and pick all your slides at once, in order. New photos go after the ones already there, and up to 10 fit. If one lands in the wrong place, press ← next to its thumbnail to move it one place earlier.
3. Write the caption. The first message is the caption shown under the username. Point it at the slides ("Swipe through and save this") and end with a few hashtags.
4. Type the counts and comments. Fill in "Likes" and "Comments" on the post with uneven numbers, like "3,912" and "128", and the "Time" as an age, like "5 hours ago". Each message after the caption is a comment; write two or three with handles that look real.
5. Export every slide. Click the first thumbnail and download the PNG at 2x or 3x: the post shows that slide with the "1/N" badge and the first dot lit. Then click the next thumbnail and download again, and so on. Switch on dark mode under Settings if you want to show the cover in both feeds.

How to present it

Put the cover PNG on its own first, at phone size, and ask one question: would you stop on this? Then lay the other slides out in a row, in order, so the client can read the swipe as a story. Seeing the counter go from "1/6" to "6/6" with the same handle on every slide is what sells the idea of a series.

If the client wants to change the order, press ← on the thumbnails and export again; it takes seconds. Keep the caption in the mockup too, since clients often sign off on the words at the same time as the design.

Details that give a mockup away

Text cut off at the edges means a slide wasn't square. Round counts like "1,000 likes" look typed in, and five comment lines under "View all 3 comments" don't add up. A cover with a full paragraph of text, or slides that each use a different style, read as a draft rather than a post.

Use it the right way

Carousel mockups are for client previews, content calendars, pitch decks, case studies and lessons on social media. Do not make posts in the name of a real person or brand that has not asked for them, and do not pass a mockup off as a real post. Our acceptable use page has the details.