Produces the social still set - OG and link-card images at 1200x630, quote cards, and static ad images - recomposed per platform from one master composition and shipped as runnable HTML/CSS compositions, with critical content held inside the central 60 percent and a 25 percent-scale legibility gate before anything ships. Use when someone asks "make an OG image for this page", "design a quote card from this testimonial", "create the static ad images for this campaign", or "our link previews look broken on X and LinkedIn". Do NOT use for YouTube thumbnails - use thumbnail-concept instead; for captions and post copy, use social-caption-writer; for video posts, use social-video-formatter; for sourcing stock photography, use stock-photo-finder; the product stills inside these images come from marketing-screenshot-craft.
---
name: social-image-designer
description: Produces the social still set - OG and link-card images at 1200x630, quote cards, and static ad images - recomposed per platform from one master composition and shipped as runnable HTML/CSS compositions, with critical content held inside the central 60 percent and a 25 percent-scale legibility gate before anything ships. Use when someone asks "make an OG image for this page", "design a quote card from this testimonial", "create the static ad images for this campaign", or "our link previews look broken on X and LinkedIn". Do NOT use for YouTube thumbnails - use thumbnail-concept instead; for captions and post copy, use social-caption-writer; for video posts, use social-video-formatter; for sourcing stock photography, use stock-photo-finder; the product stills inside these images come from marketing-screenshot-craft.
---
# social-image-designer
Platforms composite your art into surfaces you do not control - cropped link cards, rounded masks, overlaid play buttons, tiny feed tiles - and most impressions happen at a fraction of the canvas you designed. The costly mistake is art-directing the full-size composition and shipping images whose message lives in the crop zone. This skill produces the campaign's social still set as runnable HTML/CSS compositions, recomposed per platform from one master, gated by geometry that survives the platform's hands.
## Operating procedure
Work the steps in order: master before renditions, because recomposition from one master is what keeps a campaign coherent - a set of independently designed tiles drifts on sight, and drift is the automation tell. Safe zones before art, because the geometry is non-negotiable and the art is not: decoration placed first always ends up defending territory the platform owns.
### Step 1: Gather the charter and the campaign inputs
Ask for these inputs before composing anything. If any input is a guess, label it a guess and move on.
1. **Charter**: the client's charter block, in the format defined in premium-design-foundations. Paste the charter block if one exists. If the client has a charter but the foundations pack is not installed, elicit the needed values directly and label them provisional. If no charter exists at all, halt and route to premium-design-foundations - never substitute worked-example values.
2. **Claim or quote**: the one message the set carries, verbatim. Quotes arrive with attribution - name, role, and company - or they do not ship.
3. **Platforms and placements**: which surfaces and which slots - link card, feed image, static ad placement - so every rendition is composed at native dimensions from the start.
4. **Campaign stills**: the framed screenshots available, drawn from the campaign fixture dataset defined in marketing-screenshot-craft. Product UI inside a social image is never mocked here.
### Step 2: Build the master composition
One idea per image - an image carrying two claims delivers neither. Hold the headline to 7 words or fewer. On quote cards, hold the display quote to 8 words or fewer: display-set type earns its size only under a hard word ceiling, so a longer quote demotes to body-size text and lets the attribution carry the visual weight. The master is the single composition every rendition restates; nothing enters a rendition that the master does not already say.