Make a LinkedIn Banner

How it works

Your reference image is read by an image-editing model along with an instruction describing a professional banner composition: restrained color, clear negative space, safe placement around the profile overlap, no generated text.

The model composes a new image at the banner aspect. It is not cropping your photo — it is generating a wide, shallow picture informed by yours, which is why a second run produces a different banner rather than the same one again.

The result is delivered at exactly 1584 by 396 pixels.

Getting to exactly 396

This is a small technical detail with a visible consequence, and it is the reason this page can promise an exact number.

The image is generated in a latent space where dimensions must be multiples of eight. 396 is not — it is 49.5 eights — so a generator asked for 396 quietly produces 392 and returns an image four pixels short. Nothing errors. The file looks correct until LinkedIn rescales it to fit, at which point everything is very slightly soft and nobody can say why.

Here the banner is generated at 1584 by 400, which is a legal size, and then scaled down to 1584 by 396. A four pixel reduction is invisible, and the file that leaves is the size the platform expects.

The parts nobody sees

A LinkedIn banner is unusual among social images because so much of it is obscured by the interface rather than by the crop.

The profile photo sits over the lower left on desktop, covering roughly a fifth of the width and most of the height in that corner. Below the banner, the name and headline block sits close enough that the bottom edge is visually crowded even where it is not covered.

The mobile app, where most of the audience is, shows a narrower slice. Material at the far left and far right is simply gone.

Between them, the region that survives on every device is the upper middle and upper right. That is where anything load-bearing belongs.

A check that takes ten seconds

Open the generated banner and do two things.

Put a circle over the lower left, about a fifth of the width across. Then hide a fifth of the image from each side. Look at what is left.

If the banner still reads — if there is a subject, if the composition is not suddenly lopsided, if nothing important vanished — it will survive contact with the real profile page. If it does not, generate another one rather than uploading and hoping.

Why there is no text

The instruction explicitly asks for no generated lettering, and the negative instruction lists unreadable text as something to avoid.

Image models are unreliable at text. They produce shapes with the right rhythm and weight that resolve, on inspection, into near-words. On a banner carrying your name or your company, that is a mistake sitting permanently at the top of your profile. Add text with a tool that knows what letters are.

Publication gate

This page ships once the workflow has been run against a horizon-led reference, a dense reference, and a portrait-oriented reference, with each output measured at 1584 by 396 and checked under the profile overlap and the mobile crop.