Post, story, landscape: which format for what

The 1080 × 1080 pixel square remains the reference format for a feed post. It displays correctly everywhere, including outside Instagram, and fills a grid cell without cropping.

The 1080 × 1920 pixel vertical matches stories and short-form formats. It offers the most usable surface and commands the strongest attention — but its edges are also the most crowded by the interface.

The 1920 × 1080 pixel landscape serves outside social media: club website, clubhouse screen, banner, video thumbnail.

On a story, the interface occupies the top and bottom of the screen: the progress bar and account name at the top, the reply field at the bottom. Text placed in those bands will be partly hidden, and on some phones completely.

The practical rule is to reserve roughly 250 pixels at the top and 250 at the bottom of a 1920-pixel-tall story. Anything essential — score, name, date — stays within the central 1400 pixels.

The same content doesn't transpose mechanically from one format to another. Turning a square visual into a story by adding colour bands top and bottom looks visibly bodged.

A successful adaptation rethinks the layout: what sat side by side in landscape stacks vertically, and the size hierarchy is readjusted. The data stays the same, the layout changes.

That's exactly what Timline's multi-artboard approach does: one document holds all three formats, the data is shared, and each format keeps its own composition.

Exporting to PNG preserves the sharpness of text and flat colour, at the cost of a heavier file. It's the right choice for a mostly typographic visual — which a line-up or a score is.

JPG suits visuals where a photograph dominates. A goal visual on a photographic background gains nothing from PNG.

There's no point exceeding 1080 pixels wide for social media: the platforms recompress anyway. Exporting at 4000 pixels bloats the file without improving the final result.

The one case that justifies higher resolution is print — a poster for the clubhouse, a flyer, a matchday programme. There the reasoning changes: you count in centimetres and dots per inch, and a visual designed for Instagram will be too small.

Instagram concentrates attention, but it isn't the only place club visuals live. Facebook remains, in many amateur clubs, the network with the widest audience — particularly among parents and committee members — even if engagement is lower.

The square format works fine on Facebook, which saves producing another variant. The point to watch is the accompanying text: where Instagram tolerates a short caption, Facebook favours posts that give the context.

Then there are the non-social surfaces, often forgotten: the club website, the clubhouse screen or noticeboard, the team's WhatsApp group. Those are what justify the landscape format, and they have the advantage of depending on no algorithm at all.