Resize design for social media: one look, every size

To resize design for social media properly, treat every format as its own layout. Stretching a square post into a banner is the fastest way to make it look wrong: the words end up too small, the background distorts and the margins stop making sense. The fix is to keep the look, the words and the hierarchy, and lay them out again for each shape. In Gradiently that is one step, called copy to sizes.

This guide covers why resizing breaks designs, how each shape wants to be laid out, and how to go from one finished design to a full set. For the numbers themselves, keep social media image sizes open in another tab.

Why stretching and cropping fail

A design is a set of relationships: headline to margin, headline to supporting line, words to the brightest part of the background. Change the shape and those relationships break in predictable ways.

How each shape wants to be laid out

There are really only three families of shape, and each has a natural layout. Once you see them, resizing becomes a set of small decisions rather than a redesign.

Story 9:16

1080 × 1920

Portrait post 4:5

1080 × 1350

Square post 1:1

1080 × 1080

X post 16:9

1600 × 900

X header 3:1

1500 × 500

LinkedIn banner

1584 × 396

This is why Gradiently's templates are functions of shape rather than fixed pictures. An announcement on a story stacks; on a header it runs across; on a square it centres its weight. The design system decides the arrangement so you don't have to rebuild it for every platform.

The background has to resize too

Most resizing tools move the words and leave the background as an image, which is then stretched or cropped. A Mark isn't an image. It is a recipe, rendered for each size, so the material keeps its character at any aspect: a story gets a composition made for a tall frame, a banner gets one made for a wide frame, and neither is a crop of the other.

The same goes for legibility. The Mark makes room for words wherever they land in each format, and Auto ink picks light or dark per line, so a headline that reads on the square still reads after it moves to a different part of the story.

How to copy a design to other sizes in Gradiently

1. 1

   Finish one design first

   Get the words, hierarchy and Mark right in the format you care about most. Everything else follows from it.

2. 2

   Open Resize

   It is in the Studio's left rail. Search by platform or size, such as Instagram story, A4 or 1080 × 1920, or browse by platform. Star the sizes you use often and they wait in Favourites.

3. 3

   Choose several sizes

   Select as many as you need. Each one is laid out again for its shape and previewed before anything changes.

4. 4

   Pick Copy & resize

   This makes a new design for each size, beside the original in your workspace. The original stays exactly as it was.

5. 5

   Adjust each copy if needed

   Every copy is a normal design. Shorten a line for the header, move the logo on the story; changes to one don't touch the others.

Resize can also work in place: resize the current page, all pages, or the whole design without making copies. Custom sizes can be typed in pixels, or in millimetres, centimetres or inches for print, where they become pixels at 300 dpi.

A checklist for every resized set

• The headline is readable at the size people actually see it, which for thumbnails and headers is small.
• Nothing important sits under platform buttons, captions or profile photos.
• The brightest or calmest part of the background sits behind the words in every format.
• Logos are the same relative size across the set, not scaled with each canvas.
• The set looks like one brand when laid side by side. Brand consistency explains why that matters more than any single post.