TikTok Video
1080 x 1920 px sRGB 9:16 portrait
A 1080 by 1920 px vertical canvas for TikTok covers and video frames. The same shape as an Instagram Story, but with louder, busier UI surrounding it.
about a phone-screen tall vertical
About this size
TikTok's UI is the most aggressive of any major platform. The right edge belongs to the action rail (like, comment, share, music disc). The bottom 480 px belongs to captions, username, and the music tag. The top 130 px is profile chrome. What remains is roughly a centre-left rectangle, and that is where the focal subject has to live.
Video covers face an extra wrinkle: the feed thumbnail shows roughly the centre square of the 9:16 frame. Compose with both surfaces in mind. A face or product placed at the vertical centre survives both the full-screen play and the cropped feed preview. Anything pinned to the edges disappears in one view or the other.
- TikTok videos
- Vertical covers
- Phone-first art
Pro tips
- 1 Keep the focal subject in the centre-left of the frame. The right-edge action rail covers anything inside the rightmost 100 px.
- 2 The bottom 480 px is overlay territory. Captions and music tags live there. Push design weight upward into the visible band.
- 3 One short headline beats dense copy. The viewer is mid-scroll and decides in under a second.
- 4 Treat the cover as the first frame of the video, not as a separate poster. A cover that matches frame one of the playback reads as intentional; a cover that doesn't reads as a mistake.
Common mistakes
- Designing to all four edges. The reader sees a roughly square middle slice in the feed and a wider portrait slice in the player, neither of which matches a four-edge composition.
- Type sized for a desktop preview that disappears at phone scale. TikTok is consumed on phones; design at phone scale.
- Forgetting the music tag. The disc icon and song title pin themselves to the bottom-left in nearly every video, and any artwork under them gets obscured.
Frequently asked
What aspect ratio is TikTok?
9:16. 1080 by 1920 px is the standard high-quality canvas, and matches what most phones record at.
Is this the same size as Instagram Stories?
Same canvas. Different overlays. TikTok's right-edge action rail and bottom caption band are larger than Instagram's, so design margins need to be tighter.
What is the safe area on TikTok?
Roughly the centre-left two-thirds. Stay out of the right 100 px and the bottom 480 px and the cover survives both the feed thumbnail and the full-screen view.
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