Style Guide — Instagram “Beautiful”

The Instagram look: premium, clinical, editorial. Where TikTok grabs attention, Instagram earns trust. Every IG post should look like a page from a research lab’s field notes — calm, precise, and obviously credible. Reference: POST-20260603-001 (_assets/POST-20260603-001-ig-01.png … -03.png).

Why this style

The IG audience and the research buyer reward authority and restraint. Clean type, generous space, a single accent colour and a visible “we test everything” standard do more for conversion than colour or hype. This is the format that gets saved and that makes the brand look bigger than it is.

The format

• Carousel of 3–5 slides, 1080 × 1350 each.
• Slide 1 — Cover: kicker label + big serif headline (the question/claim) + one-line subhead + a small line-art vial + swipe →.
• Middle slides: one idea each. A numbered section label, a short serif statement, a small diagram or a tight paragraph. Never a wall of text.
• Last slide — Trust + CTA: the payoff, then THE INDEXA STANDARD card (“Every compound ships with a third-party COA. Verify the batch before you trust the vial.”), then a CTA (“Read the full primer → link in bio”).

Visual system (design tokens)

• Paper #F4F1E9 (warm off-white background)
• Ink #16181D (headlines, key text)
• Indigo #3D34C9 (the single accent — labels, highlights, one diagram colour)
• Sub #5B5C57 (body / secondary)
• Hairline #CFC9B8 (the thin frame + rules)
• Type: serif for headlines (editorial weight) + clean sans for body + mono, letter-spaced, ALL-CAPS for kicker/footer labels. This three-voice system is the brand on IG.
• Frame: a 2px hairline inset border on every slide; a header rule under INDEXA / RESEARCH NOTES / NN/03 and a footer rule above @indexalabs + disclaimer. Consistency across slides = the “system” feeling.
• Imagery: thin line-art (vials, bead chains, molecules) in ink + indigo. No stock photos, no gradients, no drop shadows.

Layout rules

• One idea per slide. Lots of breathing room; let the paper show.
• Left-aligned text, consistent left margin (~84px inside the frame).
• Headline ≤ 6 words; subhead ≤ 12. If it doesn’t fit on two lines, cut words.
• Always: page number (NN/03), @indexalabs, and the research-use disclaimer in the footer.

Copy rules

• Calm, exact, no hype. “Studied across…”, “what research used…”, never “boosts/cures”.
• The cover headline is usually a question or a flat true statement.
• Caption: expand the carousel into a clean paragraph; lead with the hook line; end with a save prompt + disclaimer. 8–12 researched hashtags.

Hard rules (guardrail)

• Research/educational framing only. No dosing, no medical claims. Disclaimer in footer of slides and in caption.
• The COA/Verify trust line should appear on the final slide of most posts — it’s our strongest conversion asset.

Reusable template (SVG generator)

The three slides are generated by mockups/gen_ig.py (in the session outputs) and stored as editable .svg in _assets/. To make a new carousel: duplicate a slide SVG, change the kicker/headline/body, keep the frame + tokens, then export:

convert -density 96 -background none POST-YYYYMMDD-NNN-ig-01.svg POST-YYYYMMDD-NNN-ig-01.png

(Canva alternative: rebuild this token set as a brand kit — same colours, serif + mono pairing, hairline frame — for faster non-code editing.)

Headline bank (steal these)

• “What is a peptide?”
• “How to read a COA in 60 seconds”
• “Reconstitution, without the panic”
• “Protein vs peptide — the actual difference”
• “Why ‘research grade’ is a claim, not a guarantee”