Sizing product mockups for social platforms

Every platform crops, and every platform crops differently between the feed, the preview and the full view. The reliable approach is not to memorise a table of exact pixel sizes but to design inside a safe area that survives all the common crops, then export a couple of ratios from the same composition.

Three ratios cover almost everything

Square at 1080 × 1080 works in feeds nearly everywhere and is the safest single export. Landscape at 1200 × 630 covers link previews, X and LinkedIn cards. Vertical at 1080 × 1350 or 1080 × 1920 covers Instagram feed and stories. Build the composition once with a centred device and generous margin, then re-export at those three ratios by adjusting the framing rather than by rescaling the same file.

Design for the crop you cannot see

Feed previews often crop a landscape image to something closer to square, and link cards crop from the top and bottom. Keep the device and any text inside the central area — roughly the middle 80 percent both ways — and treat the outer band as sacrificial. A caption that reads perfectly in your export and is cut in half in the feed is the single most common social mistake.

Motion outperforms stills, briefly

A two-to-four-second silent loop of a mockup turning or a push-in consistently outperforms a static image in feeds that autoplay. Keep it short enough that the loop point is invisible, export it at the same ratio as the still, and always upload a good poster frame, since many surfaces show a still first and some never play the video at all.