Guide
Safe zones are the part of the frame the app does not draw on
Safe zones are the areas of a video frame where important content is safe from being covered, because every vertical app draws its own interface over the edges: captions and usernames along the bottom, buttons up the right side, system elements at the top. Anything essential belongs in the clear middle band.
- Edges an app reliably draws over
- 3
- Of the height to keep clear at each end
- ~1/10
- Master file that fits every vertical feed
- 1
The idea is older than phones, and it inverted
Broadcast television had safe areas first. CRT sets cropped the edge of the picture unpredictably, so anything essential stayed inside a title-safe rectangle drawn on every monitor.
Phones removed the cropping and added something worse. The picture now arrives intact, and then the app paints controls on top of it.
So the modern safe zone is not about losing pixels. It is about your pixels being underneath somebody else's interface, which moves with every app redesign.
The result is the same discipline with a new cause. The frame has a usable middle and untrustworthy edges, and the edges belong to the platform.
Three edges are taken, and each takes something different
The exact dimensions vary by app and change with updates, but the shape of the occupation is stable across every vertical feed.
- The bottom. Caption text, the account name and the audio strip sit here. Burned-in text pinned to the bottom edge sits underneath them.
- The right side. The action buttons stack here. A logo or product in the lower right corner is behind them on arrival.
- The top. System status, search and navigation chrome. A key visual at the extreme top clips on some devices.
- The left edge is the quietest, and still not worth trusting with anything that cannot afford to be missed.
Roughly eight tenths of the height is yours
About a tenth at each end belongs to interface. Anything that must be read lives inside the lit band.
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
Design for the strictest app and you never make a second version
One 9:16 file usually serves several destinations, and each destination covers a slightly different part of the frame. Designing per app multiplies work for no gain.
The insurance is generous margins. Roughly a tenth of the height clear at the top and the bottom, and a band clear on the right. It looks like waste until an app redesigns and your whole library still works.
Frame the speaker with the head slightly high, so the face sits in the upper part of the safe band and the lower band stays free for captions.
Verify on a phone, not a monitor. Open the app, note where the buttons sit today, and hold an export beside it. A minute per caption style, not per video.
Captions are the most common casualty, and the most avoidable
Caption text is the element most often lost to the bottom edge, because bottom-centre feels natural and is exactly where the app writes its own text.
The fix is positioning captions in the central band, clear of both the bottom strip and the right-hand stack, and keeping them there in every video so the library ages together.
Cutroom positions its caption packs inside the safe band, and the position is adjustable per style, so the check is a glance rather than a redesign.
Whatever tool you use, make the check once per style and then reuse the style. Safe zones punish improvisation, not ignorance.
Questions people ask
- Are safe zones the same on every platform?
- No, and they change with app updates. The stable facts are the shape of the occupation: bottom and right are heavily used, the top is clipped on some devices. Generous margins cover the differences.
- What are the actual pixel margins?
- On a 1080 by 1920 frame, keeping roughly 190 pixels clear at the top and bottom and a band clear on the right is a durable rule. Precise per-app figures exist and go stale faster than they are worth memorising.
- Do safe zones apply to organic posts too?
- Yes, identically. The interface does not care whether the video is paid. Ads just make the cost visible, because a covered caption or a hidden product shot is media spend doing nothing.
- What about horizontal or square video?
- The concept applies wherever an interface overlays the player, but the margins here are for full-screen vertical feeds. A 16:9 video in a feed is letterboxed, which creates different and mostly smaller overlaps.
The middle of the frame is yours and the edges never were. Keep the message in the band the apps leave alone, and one export survives every redesign they ship.