LinkedIn Banner
Year
2025
Services
Summary
A free Figma template that scaled to 181+ community duplications. Designed for adaptability across roles, seniority levels, and industries.
Open in Figma↗Why this exists
The gap nobody talks about
During a career coaching programme (LHH), I kept seeing the same thing: people redesigning their LinkedIn banners based on how they looked in Canva or Figma, uploading them, and then discovering the crop was wrong. Text was cut off. Contrast broke on mobile. The profile photo was covering the face they'd designed around.
LinkedIn's banner displays differently depending on screen size, device type, and whether the viewer is on light or dark mode. You only find out it's broken after you've already shown it to everyone who visited your profile.
That's a fixable problem.
You only find out it's broken after you've already shown it to everyone who visited your profile.
Before I built anything
Starting with the right questions
I started with a structured discovery framework - not because it was a big project, but because building without one wastes time. I wrote down:
- What problem am I actually solving?
- What assumptions am I making?
- What's the risk if I'm wrong?
- How will I know when it's done?
The answer to those questions shaped the entire template. The core insight: the gap between "design editor view" and "live profile view" is the problem. Everything else in the template exists to close that gap.
I analysed how banners break in practice: the image crop zone, the safe area for text, contrast on white vs dark backgrounds, how the profile photo overlaps on mobile vs desktop. I turned each finding into a design rule that lives inside the template itself.
What's inside
Three ways to use it
The template gives you three paths depending on how much control you want.
Quick Start
Edit the text and image placeholders, check the preview panel, export. Five minutes, done.
Use Template
All text layers, image placeholders, and colour fills are editable components. Follow the guide layer to understand the safe zones, then swap in your own content.
Freeroam
Detach and go. The frame dimensions are locked to the correct export size (1584 x 396px). Everything else is yours.
What the preview panel shows
- Desktop light mode
- Desktop dark mode
- Mobile light mode
- Mobile dark mode
- Profile photo overlap - positioned at the correct size and offset
Also inside
A short tutorial, embedded in the file itself. No external link, no separate video. Open the file, read the guide layer, start designing.
Template previews
Shipping something for everyone
What I took from this
This template is used by non-designers. That changed how I thought about it.
A template for a designer audience can assume familiarity with Figma - layers, components, frames. A template for everyone - job seekers, career changers, people updating their profile after a promotion - can't assume any of that.
So I built the three paths. Quick Start requires no Figma knowledge at all. Freeroam is there for the people who'll immediately ignore everything and go freestyle (they will, and that's fine - the frame dimensions keep them safe).
The tutorial is embedded in the file because people don't watch separate tutorial videos. They open the file, see text, and follow it. That's the behaviour. Design for the behaviour.
186 people used this. That's 186 LinkedIn profiles that looked right on the first upload.
A small thing that solved a real problem
Not everything needs to be a complex enterprise project. Sometimes a focused two-week effort produces something that just works, ships to the world, and keeps helping people after you've moved on to the next thing.
This template is live. It's free. If you're redesigning your LinkedIn banner, go use it.
Open in Figma Community