Turning text confessions into Instagram images people can read

Short answer. Use a 1080 × 1080 px square image (or 1080 × 1350 px portrait), body text of about 44 to 52 px, margins of at least 80 px and a contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1 or better. Split a long confession into a carousel, and put the full text in the alt text and the caption.

A confession page on Facebook can publish a paragraph of text and be done with it. Instagram will not accept that: every post needs an image or a video. So confession pages turn text into pictures — and most do it badly. The type is too small, grey sits on a gradient, the last three lines disappear under the edge of the frame, and the result is unreadable on the device where almost all of it is viewed.

This guide covers the decisions that make a text image legible. It assumes no design training and no particular tool.

Choose the shape

Instagram's feed supports several aspect ratios for images. The two that matter for text posts are:

Two further points. First, the profile grid shows a cropped preview of each post, and Instagram has altered the shape of that preview over time. Keep everything important — particularly the first lines of the text and the post number — well inside the centre of the image, so that a grid crop does not cut through it. Second, pick one shape and stay with it. A feed that alternates between shapes looks untidy, and your template has to be designed twice.

Instagram changes its supported dimensions from time to time. Check its help pages before you build a template that you will be using for years.

Whatever shape you choose, export at 1080 pixels wide. Larger files are scaled down. Smaller ones are scaled up, and scaled-up text goes soft at the edges.

Size the type for a phone, not for your monitor

This is the mistake that ruins most templates. On a laptop, a 1080-pixel image is displayed large, and 28-pixel type looks perfectly comfortable. On a phone, the same image is shown about as wide as your hand, and that same type is the size of the small print on a medicine packet.

There are two ways to get it right.

The rule of thumb. On an image 1080 pixels wide, body text should be no smaller than roughly 40 pixels, and 44 to 52 is more comfortable. Text below about 32 pixels will be a struggle for many readers.

The test. Send the image to your own phone, hold it at arm's length, and read it. If you find yourself bringing the phone closer, the type is too small. Do this with every template before you adopt it.

Larger type means fewer words to an image. Accept that. A post that people can read across two slides is better than one that fits on a single slide and cannot be read.

Give the text room

• Margins. Leave at least 80 pixels clear on every side of a 1080-pixel image. Text running to the edge looks cramped, and some of it will be hidden behind interface elements or lost in a crop.
• Line length. Aim for roughly 25 to 40 characters to a line. Longer lines make it hard for the eye to find the beginning of the next one.
• Line spacing. Set it to between 1.3 and 1.5 times the type size. Tightly packed lines are tiring to read.
• Alignment. Left-aligned text is easier to read than centred text for anything beyond a couple of lines. Centring suits a single short sentence.
• Paragraphs. Keep the submitter's paragraph breaks. A solid block of text is far more forbidding than three short paragraphs.

Contrast

Text must stand out clearly from whatever lies behind it. The accessibility standard used across the web, WCAG, asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 between ordinary text and its background, and there are free online checkers that will work out the ratio from two colour values.

In practice:

• Dark text on a light, plain background, or light on dark, always works. Near-black on off-white is the most readable combination available.
• Gradients are risky. Text that reads well at the dark end of a gradient may vanish at the light end. If you use a gradient, check the contrast at its weakest point, or lay a solid or semi-opaque panel behind the text.
• Photographs as backgrounds almost never work without a strong overlay. A busy picture behind text makes both harder to see.
• Avoid mid-greys and pastels for text. They appear refined on a calibrated monitor and disappear on a phone in sunlight.
• Do not depend on colour alone. Red text on green may be invisible to a colour-blind reader.

Pick a typeface that covers your languages

A decorative display typeface may look distinctive, but confessions are body text, and body text needs a typeface designed for reading: clear letterforms, open spacing, a regular weight.

For a Malaysian page there is a further requirement, which is easy to miss. Your submitters write in several scripts. A typeface that has only Latin letters will render Chinese characters, Tamil or Jawi as empty boxes, or will silently switch to an unrelated fallback typeface in the middle of a sentence. Before you settle on a typeface:

• test it with a real mixed-language submission;
• check that Chinese, Tamil and Arabic-script text all render, and at a matching weight and size;
• check that emoji appear and are not clipped;
• for Jawi and Arabic, check that the text runs right to left and that the letters join correctly — some image generators get this wrong.

The large open-source type families that offer matching designs across many scripts were made for precisely this situation.

Long submissions

A 400-word confession will not fit on one image at a readable size. The choices, in order of preference, are these.

A carousel. Split the text over several slides. Break at paragraph boundaries and not in the middle of a sentence, number the slides ("2/4") so that readers know there is more, and give the first slide a strong opening, because it is the only one shown in the feed.

An excerpt with the full text in the caption. Put the opening lines on the image, and the whole submission in the caption. This works well for very long posts and has the advantage that the caption is real text — searchable, translatable, and readable by screen readers.

Reducing the type size. Only within limits. Decide on a minimum size and never go below it. Once the text no longer fits at that minimum, change to a carousel.

Do not trim a submission to make it fit without marking that you have done so. Cutting someone's words changes their meaning.

What belongs on every image

• The post number, large enough to read, in the same position every time. It is how readers refer to posts.
• The page name or handle, small, so that a screenshot shared elsewhere still shows where it came from.
• Nothing else. No QR codes, no stickers, no "follow us for more", no decorative clutter. The submission is the content.

Consistency matters more than cleverness. A reader should recognise your posts in a feed before reading a single word.

Write alt text and use the caption

A picture of text is invisible to anyone using a screen reader unless you supply a description. Instagram lets you add alt text to an image at the time of posting, under the advanced or accessibility settings, or afterwards by editing the post. The right alt text for a confession image is simply the text of the confession.

Putting the full text in the caption as well serves the same readers and others besides: it can be translated by the application, searched, and copied. It costs you nothing, since you already have the text.

Many scheduling and publishing tools allow alt text to be set as part of the workflow. If you generate images automatically, make sure the pipeline fills in the alt text from the same source text and does not leave it empty.

Check before you publish

A text image fails in ways that are obvious the moment you look at it, and invisible if you do not. For every post, or at least for every change of template:

• look at it on a phone, at arm's length;
• confirm that nothing is cut off at the bottom — the commonest fault in generated images is text that overflows;
• confirm that every character has rendered, with no boxes;
• look at the first slide on its own, since that is all most people will see;
• look at how it appears in the profile grid.

If your images are generated automatically from submissions, test the generator against extreme cases: a three-word submission, a 600-word one, one with no paragraph breaks at all, one written entirely in emoji, and one that mixes three scripts.

Do not carry over what should not be there

The image is produced from the submission, so anything that ought to have been removed from the text — a name, a room number, a phone number — will appear in the image, and in the caption, and in the alt text. Moderate the text first and generate the image from the approved version. If a post is later edited or removed on one platform, do the same on the other. An Instagram image is easily forgotten when the Facebook post is taken down. See How to handle a takedown request.

Common questions

What size should a confession image be for Instagram?

1080 × 1080 px square for short posts and for cross-posting, or 1080 × 1350 px portrait for longer ones. Export at 1080 pixels wide, pick one shape and stay with it, and keep the post number and the first lines well inside the centre so that the profile grid crop does not cut through them.

What font size is readable on an Instagram text post?

On an image 1080 pixels wide, body text should be no smaller than roughly 40 px, and 44 to 52 px is more comfortable. Text below about 32 px is a struggle for many readers. Test it by sending the image to your own phone and reading it at arm's length.

How do you post a long confession on Instagram?

Split it into a carousel, breaking at paragraph boundaries and numbering the slides. For very long posts, put the opening lines on the image and the whole submission in the caption. Decide on a minimum type size and never go below it, and do not trim a submission without marking that you have done so.

What colours work best for text on an image?

Dark text on a light, plain background, or light text on a dark one. Aim for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1. Gradients are risky because the text can vanish at the light end, photographs need a strong overlay, and mid-greys and pastels disappear on a phone in sunlight.

Should confession images have alt text?

Yes. A picture of text is invisible to a screen reader unless you supply a description, and the right alt text for a confession image is simply the text of the confession. Putting the full text in the caption as well makes it searchable, translatable and easy to copy.

A template specification to start from

Adjust it to your page's character, and then send the result to your phone and read it at arm's length. That test settles more arguments about design than any amount of discussion.