Promo design basics.

Start with one idea

A promo graphic is not a poster, a menu, or a press release. It is seen only for a moment in a scrolling feed, so it gets to say exactly one thing. Before you open a canvas, finish this sentence: “When someone sees this, I want them to know ______.” If the blank contains an “and,” you have two promos, not one. Everything else on the canvas — the date, the handle, the QR code — exists to support that single idea, and anything that doesn’t support it should come off. The most common failure in promo design isn’t bad taste; it’s three competing messages fighting for the same moment of attention.

Hierarchy: title, supporting line, action

Once you have one idea, arrange the canvas so the eye lands on things in the order you choose. A reliable promo has exactly three tiers, and each tier is visibly different in size and weight from the one above it — not slightly different, obviously different.

Squint at the finished design. If the title doesn’t clearly win the squint test, the hierarchy isn’t done yet.

Contrast the viewer doesn’t have to work for

Text that looks readable on your monitor at full size can vanish on a phone in sunlight. The accessibility baseline worth designing to is the WCAG AA contrast ratio of 4.5:1 between text and its background. It isn’t just an accessibility box to tick — a promo that passes AA stays legible when the image is compressed, dimmed, or shrunk by a platform. The Studio shows a live contrast advisory against this exact 4.5:1 threshold as you pick colors, so you can see a failing pairing before you export it. Light text on a busy photo is the classic trap; if you must set text over a photo, put a solid or heavily darkened panel behind it rather than trusting the photo to stay dark in the right places.

Design for the smallest size it will be seen at

Your export is big; the places it renders are not. A YouTube thumbnail is exported at 1280×720, but in search results it often renders around 360px wide, and in the suggested sidebar around 168px wide — roughly a postage stamp. Specs current as of August 2026 — verify against the platform’s own documentation before a critical print run or launch. The practical rule: judge every design at thumbnail size before you ship it. Zoom out, or preview it with the thumbnail tool, and check that the title still reads and the subject is still recognizable. Three or four large words survive shrinking; a paragraph never does. The same logic applies to print — a QR code needs roughly 2×2 cm at minimum for close-range scanning, and a reliable scan distance is about ten times the printed code’s width, so a code meant to be scanned from across a room must be sized for that room, not for the corner of a flyer.

One design, three frames — adapt, don’t stretch

A campaign usually needs a 1080×1080 square, a 1080×1350 portrait, and a 1080×1920 story. These are different shapes, not different zoom levels of the same shape: stretching a square into a story distorts type and logos, and cropping a story into a square amputates whatever lived at the top and bottom. Instead, treat your design as a kit of parts — title, supporting line, action, background — and recompose those parts for each frame. The story format has its own hazard: on a 1080×1920 frame, roughly the top 250px and the bottom 310px can be covered by platform interface elements, so keep text and QR codes out of those bands (approximate; it varies by platform and device). The Studio generates all three formats, plus a 1280×720 thumbnail, from one campaign so the recomposition is handled for you — but the principle matters even when you compose by hand. For the full format-by-format breakdown, see social image sizes.

Photo or flat panel?

Use a photo when the image itself is the message — a venue, a product, a face people recognize. A good photo earns attention that flat color can’t. Use a flat panel when the words are the message: launch dates, offers, announcements. Flat backgrounds give you total control over contrast, keep file sizes small, and never fight the text for attention. The worst of both worlds is a mediocre stock photo with text scattered across it — it adds noise without adding meaning. If you’re unsure, start flat: a two-color panel with strong type is almost impossible to get badly wrong, and dark-on-light also happens to be what QR codes want — dark modules on a light background scan most reliably, and inverted codes should be avoided entirely.

Common mistakes

• Two or three messages on one graphic, none of which wins.
• Title and supporting line set at nearly the same size, so nothing leads.
• Text over a busy photo with no panel behind it.
• Color pairings that fail the 4.5:1 check — especially light gray on white and mid-tone on mid-tone.
• Stretching one export to fit every aspect ratio.
• A QR code jammed into a corner with no quiet zone — the code needs four modules of clear space on every side to scan reliably. The QR tool bakes the quiet zone in for you.
• Judging the design only at full size and never at the size the audience will actually see.
• No action tier at all — the viewer likes it and moves on.

Running a launch or an event? Pair this guide with the event promotion checklist to make sure the well-designed promo also ships everywhere it needs to go.