Social and is the work of making the pictures a brand posts every week: feed posts, carousels, stories, reel covers and small ads. The tools are the ones you already know from type, colour and grids. What changes is where the work is met. It is seen on a phone, usually held in one hand, between a friend's holiday photographs and a news clip, and the person looking at it did not ask to see it. A poster waits on its wall. A post has to be understood while it is moving past.
Meta's own advice to advertisers starts from the same place. 'People scan Feed quickly, particularly on mobile devices,' says its help page on text in ads, and the same page calls 'communicating what you want people to do at a glance' the most important goal of an ad. That holds for ordinary posts as well. Every design for the feed has to pass a . Shown for about a second at the size it will really appear, it should say what it is and whose it is. If that needs a second look, it has failed.
Every post is also seen small. On Instagram it becomes a tile in the , which is where somebody who taps your name sees many of your posts at once, and a video on YouTube is met as a beside a dozen others. In January 2025 Instagram changed the grid from squares to taller rectangles. Its head, Adam Mosseri, gave the reason in plain words: 'Squares are from way back in the day when you could only upload square photos,' and since most uploads are now vertical, 'cropping it down to square is pretty brutal.' Instagram's help pages, as read in October 2026, do not give the exact shape of the new tile, and the guides on the web disagree, some saying 3:4 and some 4:5. Design so that it does not matter. Keep the words and the product in the middle of the frame, away from any edge a crop could take.
Other platforms make the same kind of decision for you. YouTube's help says that a vertical video given a 16:9 custom thumbnail will have it replaced by an auto-generated 4:5 thumbnail on the home, explore and subscription pages. Pinterest warns that pins taller than 2:3 might get cut off in people's feeds. Meta adjusts ad media by itself so that one ad fits more than one , and its own help asks you to review the auto-generated crops before publishing so that nothing important is cut off. A design that only works at one exact size is fragile.
This module follows the order of the work. After this introduction comes a sheet of sizes and safe zones for 2026, each one taken from the platform's own help page and dated. Then comes the carousel, built around its first slide and its last, followed by story and reel covers and what the profile grid does to them. Ad creative is next, read through Meta's own guidance, and then type that can be read on a phone, with the contrast rules that apply and the ones that do not. After that come templates a team can fill without breaking them and a week of content planned from one shoot, with a shot list made for the crops. A short lesson covers labels and stickers, the small printed pieces that go into the parcel. Testing creative follows, using Meta's A/B test tools and changing one thing at a time. The last lesson takes one product shoot of No. 4's amber bottle and turns it into a carousel, a set of stories and two ads to test against each other.
Three neighbouring subjects are linked, not repeated. The Canva module already makes a week of posts from one Brand Kit, click by click, so this module does not walk through Canva's menus again. Storytelling covers reels. Its lessons take the hook, the script and the words on screen in turn. The Branding course's packaging lessons cover real packaging, such as dielines and working with a printer. What this module adds is the still frame, and the decisions that come before any tool is opened.
Checklist
Six checks before any post goes out
- Look at it at the size of a grid tile for one second, and say what it is and whose it is.That is the glance test. If the answer needs a second look, the design has not passed it.
- Name the one thing the post wants someone to do or to know.Meta calls communicating what you want people to do at a glance the most important goal of an ad. Ordinary posts need the same clarity.
- Keep words, faces and the product well away from all four edges.Grids, thumbnails and Meta's automatic crops each cut a different strip. The middle of the frame survives all of them.
- Use a shape that covers as much of the phone screen as the placement allows.Meta's help on aspect ratios says images and videos for mobile should cover as much screen as possible to grab attention.
- Read every word on a phone held at arm's length, not on the monitor.The monitor flatters small type. The type lesson in this module gives the checks in detail.
- Write the date and the source beside every size in the file.Sizes change. A dated size from a help page can be checked again, and a size remembered from last year cannot.
The words, in plain language
- Content design
- Designing the posts, carousels, stories and ads a brand puts out week after week, for a phone screen.
- Glance test
- Looking at a design for about a second, at the size it will really be seen, to check that its point gets across.
- Profile grid
- The page of small tiles on an Instagram profile, where every post is shown cropped to the same shape.
- Thumbnail
- The small picture people see before they tap a post or a video. It is often a crop of the real thing.
- Placement
- Meta's word for where an ad appears, such as Instagram Feed, Stories or Reels.
Why it matters
Designers trained on print tend to judge work at full size on a large monitor, which is the one place a post is never seen. Try this before anything else. Shrink your design until it is about the size of a grid tile on your screen and look at it for one second. A headline that was elegant at full size often turns into a grey stripe, and a product photographed from too far away turns into a smudge. Those two faults are the common ones, and fixing them does more for a post than changing its font.
The size of the screen also changes what counts as one idea. A poster can carry a headline, a picture, a paragraph and a logo, because the reader has stopped walking. In the feed a post has room for one message. Meta's guidance asks for primary text of one to three lines at most, and the same restraint belongs on the picture itself, where every extra element makes the one that matters smaller and harder to find at a glance. Cut the rest. For a single frame, one product and one line are usually enough, and if there is more to say, that is the job of a carousel.
People who run brand accounts disagree about the grid. One side treats it as the shop window, plans posts in rows of three and checks each new post against its neighbours before it goes out. When Instagram changed the tile shape in 2025 it was this side that complained, because years of carefully planned squares were suddenly cropped. The other side says people meet a brand in the feed far more often than on its profile, so each post should stand on its own and the grid can fall where it falls. Both have a point. A brand that people visit on purpose, such as a shop or a studio, gains from a grid that looks cared for. A brand that lives on ads and shares should spend its hours on the single post.
Finally, design for change. Platforms change their sizes and their crops, sometimes with little warning, as the 2025 grid change showed. Write the date next to every size you use, read the help page again before a big campaign, and keep important things away from the edges so that a new crop costs you nothing. The next lesson gives the sizes as of October 2026, with a link to each source so you can check them yourself.
Elsewhere
- Type
- technique
- Period
- contemporary