Safe Zone Map for Vertical Video Ads: Pixel-Exact UI Margins
Pixel-exact safe zones for TikTok, Instagram Reels, Stories, Snapchat and YouTube Shorts on a 1080×1920 canvas — where UI covers your frame and where captions and logos actually stay visible.
Every vertical platform draws its own UI on top of your video: caption bars, engagement icon columns, progress trackers, profile chips. Text or logos placed in those zones get covered on real devices even though they look fine in your editor's preview. This map gives pixel-exact dead zones on a standard 1080×1920 canvas, platform by platform.
Your editor's preview lies to you
Most editing software shows your export as a clean rectangle with nothing on top of it. The moment that file lands inside TikTok's or Instagram's player, a caption bar, a music ticker, a column of like/comment/share icons and a username chip get layered over the bottom and right edges. If your CTA text or logo sits there, it's covered on a real phone even though it looked perfect on your monitor. Safe zones exist because the preview and the shipped product are two different rectangles.
The two zones that matter most: bottom and right
Across every major short-form platform, the two danger areas are the same: the bottom strip (roughly a fifth to a third of the frame, reserved for captions, sound attribution and the caption/username row) and a narrow right-hand column (reserved for the engagement icon stack — like, comment, share, and on some platforms remix or bookmark). Top margins matter too but are shallower and platform-dependent. Design your key message to live in the central column and never let critical text touch the bottom or right edges.
Design inward, not outward
The safest practice is to build every text card and logo placement around a central safe box rather than trying to remember every platform's exact UI. Keep primary text inside roughly the center 60% of the frame width and the middle 55–60% of the frame height, and you'll clear nearly every platform's UI without needing platform-specific versions. Klip Kanvas positions on-screen captions inside this safe box automatically when it renders a script, which is one less pixel-math problem per creative.
How to use the tables below
The locked tables give pixel-exact dead zones at 1080×1920 for TikTok, Instagram Reels & Stories, and YouTube Shorts, plus a universal text/logo placement rule set and a thumb-cover map showing where a viewer's thumb physically rests during one-handed scrolling — a zone worth avoiding for anything you need seen, not just UI-covered areas.
5 tables: TikTok pixel-exact safe zone, Instagram Reels & Stories safe zone, YouTube Shorts safe zone, universal text/logo placement rules, and the thumb-cover tap-zone map.
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