There’s probably a psychology to all this, one that addresses our shorter attention spans and how focusing attention on a vertically aligned piece of content to discard the peripheral distractions gives greater impact to whatever is being shown, or how the hand-held, smaller screen behaviour patterns are more in line with content consumption rather than the bygone UX era of websites, but I’m not going to ruin the fun of a good beach-stroll video. When hedonism and the pursuit of the selfie was all that mattered. When all we had to do was live in the narrow moment of the now. Back when we didn’t need to focus on the bigger picture. And with it, Instagram is telling us to put away our landscape all-business mindset and re-embrace the portrait days of yore. We used to disparage video shot in portrait mode and any serious travel blogger worth their weight in sea salt would naturally pose in landscape to capture the full effect of the sunset/cliffs/beach that you wish you were at also.Įnter IGTV. Portrait-formatted school day photos, bubbly birthday cards and comic sections give way to the landscape seriousness of spreadsheets, unfolded novels and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. As we grow up, our world seems to shift from portrait to landscape mode.
