Back to the hub

Sizes, and the part the interface covers

The size is the easy half. What ruins a piece is text placed where the buttons are.

By Redação Swonkie

Equipa editorial

2026-09-05

Instagram · Reels and stories
Instagram · Vertical feed
Instagram · Square feed
TikTok · Video
YouTube · Shorts
YouTube · Thumbnail
LinkedIn · Post
LinkedIn · Link preview
Facebook · Feed
Pinterest · Pin

safe zone

1080 x 1920

Instagram · Reels and stories

Top covered: 250 px

Bottom covered: 422 px

Right column: 173 px

the caption and buttons eat the bottom

Everyone knows a vertical video is 1080 by 1920. Far fewer people design knowing the app will put the caption, the profile name, the audio label and a column of buttons on top of that.

You find out after publishing: the most important sentence ends up hidden behind a share button.

The three zones you lose

The bottom. The worst one. Between the caption, the account name and the progress bar, the last 20 to 25% of the screen is no place for information.

The right column. Likes, comments, shares, audio. On TikTok it takes up as much as a fifth of the width.

The top. Less serious, but enough to clip the first line of a title pushed to the edge.

The working rule

Design inside the middle 60% of the screen. Anything outside it is decoration and has to survive disappearing.

About the values

They are the conservative end of what the apps cover, measured on a 1080 by 1920 canvas and checked on 1 August 2026. Interfaces change often and every phone crops slightly differently. When in doubt, leave margin.

The test that replaces all of this

Publish privately and look at it on a phone before making it public. Two minutes, and it catches what no table catches.

See it in the product

Keep going

Prompts
Creation

2026-08-14

Prompt: turn an article into a carousel that makes sense

If the middle cards can be viewed in any order, there is no sequence. And without a sequence there is no reason to swipe.

Not splitting text across cards. Finding the sequence that only works by swiping.

I will give you an article. Turn it into a 7-card carousel.

Structure rules:
- card 1: a concrete promise, with the result the reader takes away
- card 2: the proof the promise holds (a number, an example, a contradiction)
- cards 3 to 6: one step each, in the order they are carried out
- card 7: what to do next

Text rules: 25 words maximum per card. No card may make sense out of its position. If you can
shuffle the middle cards without loss, it is not a carousel, it is a list, and you should tell me
that instead of continuing.

Redação Swonkie

Equipa editorial

Read the full piece