Square into square
The full canvas fits. Keep important detail away from the rounded corners.
01
Start with the whole image canvas.
The template scales the entire file, including transparent pixels. It does not find the person or card and fit that subject separately.
Fill the window
The image grows until it covers the window in both directions. It keeps its proportions; it is never stretched.
Anchor top + centre
The top of the file stays at the top of the window. Any excess width is shared equally between the left and right.
Hide the overflow
Excess height is hidden at the bottom. Excess width is hidden at the sides. The rounded corners also act as a mask.
Blue outline: visible windowPink hatch: cropped awayCheckerboard: transparent pixels
The sides disappear
The file scales to the window’s height. Its left and right edges extend beyond the window.
The bottom disappears
The file scales to the window’s width. The top stays visible and the lower part is hidden.
“Top-aligned” means the top of the file, not the top of the subject. A large empty area above someone’s head stays above their head. Keep the subject near the upper centre, with a little breathing room.
02
More headline height leaves less image height.
In square and portrait ads, the bottom edge stays in place while the foreground window’s top edge moves down. The window becomes shallower, not more portrait-shaped.
Shared bottom edge stays fixed.Same square source image in all three examples.
1200 × 628 behaves differently
The headline sits beside the image, so extra headline lines do not reduce the image window’s height. With a headline, the foreground window is approximately 452 × 452 px. Without a headline, it is 528 × 452 px.
These are layout illustrations at the starting font size. GWD can reduce text size to fit, so line count alone does not determine the final crop. Removing the headline also switches to a different image width.
03
Make the empty space do the work.
A person can often lose some lower body. A card or product may need its complete outline. Compose for the parts that must remain visible.
Large card in the middle
When the window becomes shallow, the lower edge of the card is outside it. Transparency around the card does not automatically protect it.
Smaller card near the top
Scale the card down and move it up inside the same square canvas. The crop removes transparent pixels underneath instead of the card.
Bottom space protects against a shallow window. Leave enough room below the subject for the expected bottom crop. Keep the canvas dimensions when exporting; do not trim the transparent border.
Side space protects against a narrow window. Keep hands, shoulders and card edges away from the file’s sides. Bottom padding alone will not fix side cropping from a wide source image.
The trade-off is subject size. More breathing room helps the whole subject survive different crops, but it also makes the subject smaller in the ad. If one composition cannot work across the required sizes, supply a separately composed foreground for the affected format.
04
Try the crop before you supply the artwork.
Change the ad size, headline and source artwork. The pink areas on the supplied file show exactly which parts of its rectangular canvas fall outside the window.
Example dimensions explain the ratio; these are not a resolution specification.
The artwork is translucent to make the overlap easy to see. Supply normal transparent-background artwork; there is no need to reduce the subject’s opacity.
Foreground windowSource pixels hidden by the cropTransparent area, not a white background
05
Before handing over a foreground image
There is no single safe margin that guarantees every subject will fit every crop. Check the intended artwork and copy together.
- Use a transparent background.Export the foreground separately from the background. Keep the intended canvas and its empty pixels.
- Put the important detail high and central.Leave a little space above hair, and enough side space around hands, shoulders and product edges.
- Decide what may be lost.Lower body cropping may be intentional. A card edge, face or important product detail usually needs to remain.
- Check the shortest window.Use the longest approved headline for square and portrait formats. Make sure the subject still works when more of the bottom disappears.
- Check the narrowest shape too.The 452 × 452 landscape foreground is square with a headline. A wider source canvas can still lose its sides there.
- Review all four final exports.Check headline and no-headline versions where used. Native GWD text fitting and rounded clipping are part of the final result.
Keep what matters in the upper centre. Give the crop something expendable to remove.
That may be transparent space, lower body, or another part of the composition that the creative team has deliberately allowed to crop.How this guide matches the template
Checked against the latest saved source, Image template 1-20261102.html, on 6 November 2026. The foreground is authored with scaling="cover" and alignment="top", inside a rounded clipping window. The guide uses the same top-centred cover geometry and the source’s four layout sizes. It does not load or modify the GWD project.
For the square and portrait examples, headline height is calculated from 1–3 lines at the starting font size. GWD’s own text fitting is not reproduced. The background is a neutral illustration, and the headline bars represent text; these are not production exports or exact Figma comparisons.
Crop calculation: scale = the larger of (window width ÷ image width) and (window height ÷ image height). Centre the scaled image horizontally and place its top at the window’s top. Transparent pixels are included in the source dimensions. The pink overlay marks rectangular cropping; corner clipping is shown on the final window.
At 1200 × 1200 with three nominal 85 px headline lines, the foreground window is approximately 1056 × 395 px. A square source therefore shows roughly its top 37% before corner clipping. This is an example, not a universal safe-area percentage or approved copy limit.