See the dead zones before you export
Threads and the Instagram surfaces you reshare to layer interface elements — progress bars, action buttons, captions, profile chips — over your content. Anything important under those elements gets hidden. This guide draws the safe zone for each surface so you can position text, logos, and faces where the interface never covers them.
How it works
Pick a surface and the tool renders a scaled preview at its true aspect ratio, then overlays a dashed green rectangle marking the safe area. The space between that rectangle and the canvas edge is the dead zone, sized to match where each surface places its chrome. The tool also reports the exact margins in pixels — top, bottom, left, and right — so you can recreate them precisely in your design tool against the real canvas dimensions.
The margins are stored as percentages of the canvas, so the preview and the pixel readouts stay correct regardless of the surface’s resolution.
Surface margins
- Feed post (4:5, 1080 × 1350): light top margin, larger bottom for the caption, wider right for action icons.
- Story share (9:16, 1080 × 1920): generous top for the progress bar and profile chip, large bottom for the reply field.
- Reel share (9:16, 1080 × 1920): wide right rail for action buttons, large bottom for caption, audio chip, and progress bar.
Tips
Centre your subject and treat the safe rectangle as the only space you can rely on. Bake captions into the safe zone rather than the dead zone, since baked text near the bottom of a reel will sit under the platform’s own caption. When a single asset is destined for multiple surfaces, design to the most restrictive safe zone — usually the reel — so it works everywhere without re-cropping.