One image, all formats: how to adapt your content to every network without redoing the work

A single campaign almost always ends up needing half a dozen different sizes: square post, story, YouTube thumbnail, LinkedIn banner. The usual mistake is treating each one as a brand-new design from scratch — when in reality, with the right starting base, it's one design job and several quick adaptations, not six independent projects.

Design the largest, least committed original of all

If you start from a high-resolution image with the main subject centred and plenty of margin around it, almost any subsequent crop — square, vertical, widescreen — will have room to work. If you start from an image already tightly cropped to one particular ratio, adapting to any other ratio forces you to crop on top of a crop, losing composition each time.

What stays fixed across formats

The colour palette, typography, logo and its relative position should be identical in all versions — that's what makes someone recognise the same campaign on Instagram and LinkedIn even when the size changes completely. What really changes between formats is the framing: how much background is visible, where the focal point falls within the new rectangle.

What you should adjust per platform

Not everything should be forcibly identical. A logo size that looks good in a desktop banner can be tiny in a story viewed on a small phone — there it's worth scaling it slightly larger than "perfect consistency" would call for, because real legibility matters more than mathematical symmetry between versions.

Organise the output before it becomes a file chaos

Naming each export with the destination and size in the filename itself — not "final-image-2" — saves real time when someone on the team needs to find the right version six months later. It's worth defining that convention before exporting the first campaign, not after the fifth.