← InsightsHappening4 min read
Instagram'sgridwentportrait.Mostbrandfeedsarestillcroppedwrong.
The profile grid stopped being square. Feeds built on square art now sit inside a taller frame, with headlines clipped and logos drifting out of view. It is a short fix per template, and almost nobody has made it.
A square habit in a portrait grid
Brand feeds were built square because the grid was square. Templates put the headline near the top edge, the logo near the bottom, and trusted that both would survive the crop.
The grid is taller now. A square post placed inside a portrait cell is either padded or scaled, and the safe zones drawn against the old crop no longer match what a visitor actually sees on the profile.
What actually gets lost
The damage is not dramatic, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed. A headline loses its first line. A logo sits half out of frame. A call to action lands below the visible part of the cell.
Nothing looks broken enough to report. But the grid stops reading as one system, and the grid is the only view most people ever see before deciding whether to follow.
The fix is a template change, not a reshoot
Design the post at the taller ratio and keep everything that has to survive inside a centre-safe band. Decorative elements can live outside it. The full post still shows in the feed; the grid crop just stops eating the message.
Old posts do not need deleting. Recrop the ones that still carry weight, leave the rest, and let the new template take the feed forward from here.
Why we file this under news
Platform geometry changes are quiet and they are frequent. Nobody sends a memo. A feed simply looks slightly worse one week and stays that way for a year.
Someone has to be watching for it. That is a large part of what running a feed actually means, and it is invisible when it is done and obvious when it is not.