The three shapes, and where each one goes
Across 6 networks and 15 surfaces there are only three shapes to get right. Here is which is which.
There are three, not thirty
Social platforms present a bewildering list of "formats", but the canvas is always one of three shapes: square, portrait, or full-screen vertical. Everything else — Reel, Story, For You, Spotlight, Status, Snap — is a name for a place, not for a shape.
- 1:1 — Square. What a profile grid shows, and the safest crop if you have no idea where it will end up.
- 4:5 — Portrait. The tallest a feed post is allowed to be, so it takes the most screen on a phone.
- 9:16 — Full screen. Stories, Reels, For You, Spotlight, Status — the whole display, edge to edge.
That is genuinely good news: you are not producing thirty versions of a post, you are producing at most three, and often two.
Which surface is which shape
The table below is generated from the same list the Contentbuilder app uses, so it cannot fall out of step with what the previews actually render.
| Platform | Surface | Shape |
|---|---|---|
| Feed | 4:5 | |
| Story | 9:16 | |
| Reel | 9:16 | |
| Grid | 1:1 | |
| TikTok | For You | 9:16 |
| Story | 9:16 | |
| Feed | 4:5 | |
| Story | 9:16 | |
| Reel | 9:16 | |
| X | Tweet | 4:5 |
| Vertical | 9:16 | |
| Snapchat | Snap | 9:16 |
| Spotlight | 9:16 | |
| Status | 9:16 | |
| Chat | 4:5 |
What actually goes wrong
The centre crop eats your subject
A 9:16 clip dropped into a 4:5 feed slot is cropped from the middle. If your subject sits in the lower third — which is where a person standing up tends to be — their head survives and their feet do not, or the other way round. Nothing warns you; you find out from the posted version.
The safe area is smaller than the canvas
A full-screen 9:16 surface is 9:16, but the top and bottom carry the platform's own furniture: an avatar, a caption, a row of buttons, a progress bar. Text placed at the very bottom of a Story is not cut off — it is covered, which looks worse, because it looks like a mistake rather than a crop.
The grid re-crops what the feed already cropped
A portrait post shows as 4:5 in the feed and 1:1 in the profile grid. The same image is therefore cropped twice, differently, and the grid version is the one a stranger sees first when they open your profile.
A practical order of work
- Shoot or export at the tallest shape you will use, usually 9:16.
- Frame your subject in the middle band, so a centre crop keeps it whole.
- Keep text away from the top and bottom eighth of a full-screen surface.
- Check the square crop before you post, not after — it is the one people see on your profile.
That last step is what Contentbuilder exists for: it renders the same post in each surface's own chrome, at the right shape, on your own screen, before it is public. See how that looks.