Design Instagram Carousels with AI in the Atelier

You've screenshotted a hundred carousel templates by now. Half of them use a font you don't have, the other half were clearly made for someone else's brand, and by slide 4 you're just dragging text boxes around hoping it looks intentional. The actual bottleneck was never your design skill. It was that every template started as somebody else's stock photo.

The Atelier flips that: it's a full design editor where a carousel is just a multi-page design, and instead of picking from a stock library, you type what you want and AIGE generates it straight onto the canvas. This is a walkthrough of your first carousel session, start to export.

Step 1: Get a design in front of you

There are two ways in. If you're starting from scratch, open aige.ws/atelier, a Canva-style editor with a left-hand dock, a canvas in the middle, and a page strip along the bottom.

If you're already working a content plan, there's a shorter path: open the Instagram Growth Agent, go to the Plan tab, and expand any planned post into a carousel. That opens a focused carousel editor seeded with a cover slide, point slides, and a CTA slide, already written from your plan's angle and caption. When it looks right, hit Send to Atelier → and it drops into the full editor as a real design: no re-importing, no lost formatting. Under the hood, a carousel already is an Atelier design; the handoff just switches which editor you're looking at it in.

Step 2: Think in pages, not slides

Once you're in the Atelier, the page strip at the bottom is your slide deck. Each page is one slide: same canvas size, own background, own set of elements. Click + to add a blank page, click the duplicate icon to clone your current slide's layout (handy for keeping a consistent look across the deck), and drag thumbnails left or right to reorder. If you delete a slide by mistake, there's an Undo action on the toast that pops up. It's not gone until you navigate away.

Keyboard people: Page Up / Page Down jumps between slides without touching the mouse, which matters once you're 8 slides deep and just want to check consistency.

Step 3: Generate the images instead of hunting for them

This is the actual point of the whole thing. Open the AI tab in the left dock, type a description of the image you want, and hit Generate. It renders at 1K resolution and lands directly on your canvas, already sized to fit your slide.

Two things worth knowing before you generate:

• Character consistency. If you've built a character in AIGE, toggle Feature [name] and every image on every slide uses the same face. Useful if your carousel is you explaining something across 6 slides and you don't want a different-looking you on each one.

• Sticker mode. Toggle it on and the AI cuts the subject out onto a transparent background automatically, so you get a clean layered element instead of a rectangle you have to mask yourself.

Honest note: generation costs credits (8 for a normal image, 13 if sticker mode is on, since that's a generation plus a background removal pass). The button shows you the cost before you commit, so there's no surprise deduction.

Step 4: Add text, shapes, and the rest of the toolkit

Everything else in the dock works exactly like you'd expect from a real editor, not a limited social-template tool:

• Text: heading, subheading, or body, each pre-sized so you're not manually setting font sizes on slide one.

• Elements: shapes, a search box into 200,000+ icons, and an emoji picker, all inserted as native layers you can recolor and resize.

• Components: turn a logo lockup or a recurring badge into a reusable component once, then insert it on every slide; updating the original updates every instance.

• Brand kit: save your palette, fonts, and logos once and reuse them across every design you make, not just this carousel.

• Design tab: starter templates you can drop in as a new page, plus Magic Design, which takes a one-line brief (bold sale poster, 50% off, neon) and lays out a whole new design in text and shapes for you to refine.

Every element can be dragged, resized, locked, or hidden the way you'd expect, and undo/redo covers all of it per page.

Step 5: Keep the deck consistent

The easiest way to blow a carousel's cohesion is to nail slide 1 and then wing slides 2 through 8. A few habits fix that fast: duplicate your best slide instead of building new ones from scratch, apply your Brand Kit colors and fonts to every slide instead of eyeballing hex codes each time, and use the page strip to scrub back and forth checking that headline sizes and margins actually match. If you built the deck from the Instagram agent's Plan tab, the cover/point/CTA structure is already consistent. You're refining, not building from zero.

Step 6: Export it

Hit the export button in the top bar and pick your format. This is where a real design tool earns its keep. You're not stuck with one flattened JPG:

• PNG, PNG (transparent), JPG, or WebP for a single slide.

• SVG (vector) if you need to edit it somewhere else later.

• PDF: if your design has more than one page, it exports as a proper multi-page PDF automatically.

• All pages · PNG or All pages · JPG: downloads every slide as its own numbered file (slug-1.png, slug-2.png…), which is exactly the format Instagram's carousel uploader wants.

• GIF (animated) or MP4/WebM (video) if you added motion to any elements and want to export the whole scene as a clip instead of static slides.

For a standard swipe-through carousel, All pages · PNG is what you want. It hands you the exact file set to upload to Instagram in order.

Quick answers

Do this next

Open the Atelier, add a second page to whatever design loads first, and generate one AI image straight onto it. That's the whole loop the rest of the carousel is built from. If you'd rather start from a content idea instead of a blank canvas, the Instagram Growth Agent's Plan tab will hand you a pre-structured deck to refine instead.