Making a clean social graphic from scratch

You need one image: an announcement, an event date, a quote, a "we're hiring". It has to look tidy in a feed next to things made by people who do this professionally, and you have an hour and no designer.

A clean graphic is mostly a matter of starting at the right size and following a handful of rules. The tool matters less than people think.

Start at the right size

Build the canvas at the size you will post, not a size you will crop later. Current common targets:

• Instagram feed, portrait: 1080 × 1350 (4:5). Takes the most room in the feed, which is why it is the usual choice.
• Square: 1080 × 1080.
• Stories and Reels covers: 1080 × 1920 (9:16).
• Link previews and LinkedIn or X images: roughly 1200 × 630 to 1200 × 675.

Platforms change their exact recommendations from time to time, so check the current guidance for the one that matters most. The ratios above have been stable for a while.

For a 9:16 story, keep text away from the top and bottom 250 pixels or so. The platform's own buttons and profile name sit there.

Five rules that do most of the work

1. One message. A graphic is read in about a second. If it needs a headline, a subheading, three bullet points and a URL, it is a document.

2. Big, then small. One large line that carries the message, and at most one smaller line that supports it. The size difference should be obvious — twice as large, not ten per cent larger.

3. Generous margins. Keep everything at least 60–80 pixels from the edge on a 1080-wide canvas. Crowded edges are the fastest way to look amateur, and some platforms crop slightly in previews.

4. Two typefaces at most, usually one. One family in two weights — bold for the headline, regular for the rest — is almost always enough.

5. Contrast you can read on a dim phone. Dark text on a light background or the reverse. Text over a photograph needs either a quiet area of the photo or a solid or semi-transparent block behind it.

Colour follows the same logic: one background, one text colour, one accent for the single thing you want noticed.

Tools you already have

Keynote is an underrated graphic tool. Set a custom slide size in the Document inspector — 1080 × 1350, for instance — lay out text and shapes with its alignment guides, then File → Export To → Images and choose PNG. For text-and-shape graphics it is quick and precise.

Preview can add text and shapes with the Markup toolbar, but positioning is imprecise and the text cannot be edited once saved. It is fine for annotating a screenshot and awkward for building a graphic.

The limits appear when you want to work with a photograph properly — cut out a subject, adjust exposure, blend an image into a background — or keep the file editable for next week's version with a different date.

Export so the text stays sharp

Use PNG for graphics that are mostly text and flat colour. JPEG compression creates faint smudges around sharp edges, which are most visible exactly where your text is.

Use JPEG for graphics that are mostly photograph, at high quality. The file will be much smaller and the difference invisible.

Export at exactly the canvas size. Uploading a 4000-pixel image lets the platform do the resizing, and platforms resize for file size, not for quality.

Keep colours in sRGB. Wider colour spaces can shift noticeably once a platform converts them.

Make it once, reuse it

The second graphic should take five minutes. Keep the file with the layout — margins, type sizes, colours, logo position — and change only the words. That consistency across a feed does more for how professional it looks than any single design.

Where Miyu Paint fits

Miyu Paint is a native image editor for Mac. The free tools cover opening, cropping and resizing images, drawing, fills and selections, with PNG and JPEG export up to 2048 pixels on the longest edge and no watermark — above every size in the list at the top of this piece.

Building a graphic you can reuse is where full access comes in: editable text and shapes, pixel, group, mask and adjustment layers, and .mpaint projects you can reopen next week and change the date on. Masks handle the text-over-photo case — cut the subject out, or fade the photo behind the text — without destroying the original image. Full access comes from a fourteen-day trial you start yourself, which never renews into a charge, or a one-time Lifetime Unlock. When the trial ends, the free tools remain and layered drafts are kept.

Everything happens on your Mac, with no account, advertising, analytics or tracking.