TikTok Cover Maker
Your cover image is the one frame of your video that gets seen twice — once in the feed before someone taps play, and again permanently on your profile grid. TikTok grabs a random frame from your video as the default cover, which is usually a blurry mid-blink mess. This tool lets you design a proper one instead.
The size, and the part almost everyone gets wrong
A TikTok cover is 1080 × 1920 pixels — the exact same 9:16 frame as the video itself. That part's simple. The part that trips people up: your cover shows up in two different crops depending on where it's viewed.
- In the full feed (For You page): the entire 9:16 cover shows, no cropping.
- On your profile grid: TikTok crops it down to roughly a square/3:4 shape, cutting off the top and bottom of your image — by some estimates around 15% off the top and 15% off the bottom.
That means anything you place near the very top or very bottom of your cover — a logo, a face, key text — can look perfect in the feed and then get sliced off the moment someone visits your profile. The fix is straightforward: keep faces, text, and anything essential centered in the middle chunk of the frame, roughly the center 70-80% vertically, so it survives both crops.
There's a second overlap to plan around too: TikTok automatically lays your caption's first line over the bottom portion of the cover — commonly cited as roughly the bottom 250-270 pixels. Put your own text there and TikTok's auto-overlay will sit right on top of it, so that zone is effectively a dead area for your own design.
Building a cover that actually earns the tap
A cover that just looks like a random paused frame doesn't do much work. Covers that consistently pull more taps tend to do one of a few things: show a clear "before/after" split, use bold high-contrast text stating the payoff of the video, or show a genuinely expressive face rather than a mid-motion blur. Whatever you choose, keep it consistent across your videos — a profile grid where every cover follows a similar visual template reads as more professional and makes people more likely to tap into your back catalog, not just the video that brought them there.
For general best practices on making image-based text legible and accessible to all viewers, see the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative's guidance on writing for the web, maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium.