Profile Banner Sizes for X, LinkedIn, and YouTube
One brand, four hostile aspect ratios. The sizes, the safe zones, and how to design a banner that survives every crop - with the two specs most guides still have wrong.
Your blog has a consistent cover system. Your profiles probably do not - and the banner is the biggest piece of brand real estate you own on someone else’s platform. The specs, up front: 1500x500 on X, 1584x396 on a personal LinkedIn profile, 4200x700 on a LinkedIn company page, and at least 2048x1152 on YouTube with only a thin 1235x338 strip guaranteed visible. Those are the platforms’ own current numbers, and two of them contradict most of what a search will tell you. The rest of this post is the per-platform detail, and the one design rule that makes all four crops survivable.
The rule before the sizes: design for the safe zone
Every platform crops your banner differently depending on the device, the window, even the browser. None of them promise you the full canvas. So the working rule is the same one that governs text on a blog cover, just harsher: put everything that must be read inside the smallest rectangle the platform guarantees, and treat the rest of the image as backdrop. Name, tagline, URL - safe zone. Texture, gradient, photography - everywhere else. A banner that fails this rule looks fine on your monitor and loses its tagline on every phone.
X: 1500x500, and a documented crop tolerance
X still officially recommends 1500x500 pixels for the header - a 3:1 canvas. JPG and PNG both work (GIFs upload too, but animation is not supported). And X’s docs contain a rare, concrete number most guides never mention: even at the recommended size, up to 60 pixels on the top and bottom can be cropped depending on screen and browser. So the real safe canvas is roughly 1500x380, centered. Keep type well inside it, and remember the profile photo sits over the lower-left corner on the rendered page - nothing important goes there.
LinkedIn: two different surfaces, two very different specs
A personal profile cover wants 1584x396 - exactly 4:1 - as JPG or PNG under 8MB. LinkedIn’s own docs warn that how it displays “may change based on the size of your web browser window and screen resolution,” which is the polite way of saying: safe-zone rule applies, center your message. Your profile photo also overlaps the banner’s lower-left on the rendered page, same as X.
A company page cover is the spec that has quietly moved: the current requirement is 4200x700 pixels, a 6:1 strip, PNG or JPEG, 3MB max. The 1128x191 figure that dominates search results is dead - it has not been in LinkedIn’s spec sheet for a long time, and uploading at it is the single most common reason company banners look blurry: the platform stretches the small image to fill the slot, and stretching reads as blur. If your page banner looks soft, re-export at 4200x700 before you touch anything else.
YouTube: one image, three devices, one thin safe strip
YouTube’s channel banner is the hardest of the four, because the same image serves TV, desktop, and mobile and each one crops it differently. The current spec: 2048x1152 (16:9) is the minimum upload, the recommendation is 2560x1440 for the best display on all devices, and the cap is 6MB.
The number that actually matters is the safe area: 1235x338 at the minimum size. That is the only region YouTube guarantees on every device. A TV shows most of your upload; a phone shows little beyond that strip. So the banner is really a two-layer design: a full 16:9 image that can lose its edges gracefully, with the brand message composed entirely inside a strip less than a third of the canvas tall. Design the strip first, then decorate outward.
The specs, at a glance
| Surface | Size | Ratio | Format, limit | Safe zone |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| X header | 1500x500 | 3:1 | JPG/PNG, no stated cap | ~60px can crop off top and bottom |
| LinkedIn personal | 1584x396 | 4:1 | JPG/PNG, 8MB | center; avatar overlaps lower-left |
| LinkedIn company | 4200x700 | 6:1 | PNG/JPEG, 3MB | center; either edge may trim to fit the screen |
| YouTube banner | 2048x1152 min, 2560x1440 recommended | 16:9 upload | 6MB | 1235x338 visible everywhere |
Elsewhere: Mastodon downscales headers to 1500x500 (up to 2MB), so an X header ports over unchanged. Bluesky publishes no banner spec at all - a wide 3:1-ish image renders fine, but there is no official number to design against.
The stale numbers, called out
Because banner specs are exactly the kind of content that gets scraped and re-published for years, the search results for these queries are full of dead numbers. The ones to ignore: 1128x191 for LinkedIn company pages (see above), 1024x576 as a YouTube minimum (the current doc says 2048x1152), 1546x423 as the YouTube safe area (the current doc says 1235x338), and any confident file-size limit for X headers - X documents a 2MB cap for profile photos only and states no header limit. When in doubt, the platform’s own help page beats any chart, including this one - specs move, and the platform moves first.
One system, four canvases
The branding half of the job is simpler than the specs half. You already have a visual identity if you have a cover style guide: a palette, one or two typefaces, a logo position, a background treatment. A banner is that same system poured into a wider, shorter mold - not a new design problem. What changes per platform is only composition: the safe zone moves, so the message moves with it.
The practical workflow in Lede: set the canvas to the platform’s exact size (the editor takes custom dimensions), lay the background treatment across the full canvas, and keep title, tagline, and mark inside the safe zone for that platform. Then change the dimensions and re-compose for the next surface - same colors, same type, same mark, four exports. Your profiles end up matching your blog covers and your social cards, which is the whole point: wherever someone meets you first, they meet the same brand.