Image sizes.

Why the same graphic needs four sizes

Every platform crops to its own aspect ratio, and a design that ignores this gets cropped for you — usually straight through your headline or QR code. A square post pasted into a story leaves dead bands above and below; a story frame forced into a feed loses its top and bottom edges. The fix is not to design once and hope. It is to design once at a shared width and export a dedicated frame for each placement: square, portrait, story, and a 16:9 thumbnail. That is exactly the set the Studio produces from one destination URL.

The master table

These are the sizes that fit each placement without platform-side cropping. Specs are current as of August 2026 — verify against the platform’s own documentation before a critical print run or launch.

YouTube thumbnails have extra constraints beyond the pixel size — a 2MB file limit, a 640px minimum width, and dramatic downscaling in search results. Those are covered in depth in the YouTube thumbnail guide.

Why 4:5 usually beats 1:1 in the feed

At the same 1080px width, a 4:5 portrait frame is 1350px tall against the square’s 1080px. On a phone held upright, that extra height translates directly into more of the screen occupied while your post is in view: the portrait frame simply takes up more vertical space before the viewer scrolls past it. That is a claim about screen real estate, not a promise about engagement — nothing about an aspect ratio guarantees results. But if the goal is to give a headline, a product shot, or a scannable QR code a fair chance to be seen, the taller frame is the better default for feed posts, and it is why Facebook’s own recommendation for feed images is 4:5 portrait.

Keep the square around anyway. Profile grids, certain embeds, and reposts into square-only contexts still want a true 1:1, and cropping a 4:5 down to square after the fact tends to behead whatever sat near the edges.

The 9:16 safe zone, in numbers

Story and Reels frames are not fully yours. Platform UI — the poster’s avatar and name up top, reply fields, captions, and action buttons down below — overlays the image itself. On a 1080×1920 frame, roughly the top 250px and the bottom 310px can be covered, which leaves a middle band of about 1080×1360 that is reliably visible. These bands are approximate and vary by platform and device, so treat them as a minimum margin, not a precise mask.

• Keep all text inside the middle band. A headline that starts life under an avatar is unreadable no matter how good the copy is.
• Keep QR codes well inside the band too — a partially covered code will not scan, and a code crowded against overlay chrome loses its quiet zone. The free QR tool generates codes with the quiet zone built in; placement is up to your layout.
• Let backgrounds, photos, and texture run edge to edge. The safe zone constrains information, not artwork.

Why you design at 1080 wide

Look down the table again: square, portrait, story, TikTok, and Facebook placements all share a 1080px width. Designing on a 1080-wide canvas means the horizontal composition — margins, type size, logo placement — survives across every vertical format, and only the height changes between exports. It also keeps you on the right side of the scaling rule: shrinking a sharp image is safe, while enlarging a small one invents pixels and softens text. Export at the table’s native sizes and let the platform downscale for smaller screens, never the reverse. If you need to convert or resize an existing asset to fit, the image tool handles that in the browser.

One design, four exports

The Studio takes one destination URL and one design and renders the full set from it: 1080×1080 square, 1080×1350 portrait, 1080×1920 story, and a clean 1280×720 YouTube thumbnail, plus the QR code as both PNG and SVG, a clickable Tap-or-Scan card, platform captions, and a machine-readable manifest — all in a single ZIP. The SVG matters if the campaign might ever go to print, since it scales to any size without quality loss; the PNGs are the web-ready rasters.

Sizing is only half the job — contrast, hierarchy, and type choices decide whether the correctly sized frame actually reads. Promo design basics covers that side.