2.5 – Creating Banner Images for Social Media Lesson

Lesson Overview

Creating social media cover images and banners that look clean and on-brand is a key step in building digital recognition. This lesson covers how to generate the right format of images with DALL-E 3, reference specific designs using Gen IDs, and finalize banners in Microsoft Designer. Learning to request wide images directly from ChatGPT saves time and gives you more control over the look and feel.

You’ll see how to upload your chosen image to Microsoft Designer, adjust it to meet the exact size requirements for sites like Facebook, and position your logo and text for maximum impact. These techniques allow entrepreneurs, small business owners, and creators to present a unified visual identity across different platforms, avoiding awkward crops or pixelation. The approach here is not just about using tools—it's about fitting your brand assets into the digital spaces your audience visits most.

Even with no design background, you’ll be able to generate, adjust, and export banners ready for upload—without starting from scratch or hiring outside help.

Who This Is For

If you’re looking to build a professional online presence with limited design experience, this lesson will help you take control of your brand visuals.

• Entrepreneurs establishing a consistent digital brand
• Social media managers updating profile covers
• Small business owners refreshing their social channels
• Content creators who want custom, on-brand images
• Anyone needing to quickly adapt AI-generated art for banners

Where This Fits in a Workflow

This lesson fits toward the middle of a workflow focused on building a visual identity using AI. Once you have logos or other brand elements generated, you’ll use the techniques here to repurpose them as cover images, Facebook banners, or LinkedIn headers. For example, after ideating with DALL-E 3, you’ll create a banner in the right size to launch a new campaign. Or, as your brand evolves, you can retrieve prior designs using Gen IDs and quickly adjust them for new social formats. This step bridges the gap between image creation and real-world publishing, ensuring your visuals always fit where you need them.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

In the traditional approach, creating banners for each platform meant manual cropping, resizing, or hiring designers to make each version—often from scratch. With the method taught here, you cut this down to a few simple steps. Gen IDs mean you can easily reference and reuse AI-generated images without losing track of which design goes with which project. Prompting for a “wide” image from DALL-E 3 yields an output perfectly suited for banners, so you avoid the guesswork of resizing a square image. Using Microsoft Designer’s custom size feature ensures your canvas is always accurate, which is critical to maintaining the right look after social media platforms crop your images. These improvements lead to faster turnaround, less design revision, and a final image that keeps your brand clear and visible on every platform.

Practice Exercise

To practice, select one of your previously generated logo images in ChatGPT. Copy its Gen ID and ask ChatGPT to create a wide image version for use as a Facebook banner. Download this image and open Microsoft Designer.

1. Start a new blank project and set the size to 820x312 pixels (the Facebook cover standard).
2. Upload your wide image, scale it to fit the canvas, and add your logo and slogan as additional layers.
3. Experiment with text placement: Does centering your slogan make it more readable? Try also adding a website or subtitle, then export your finished result.

How does your final banner compare to common examples you see online? What makes yours unique or more readable?

Course Context Recap

This lesson builds on previous work with AI-generated designs and Microsoft Designer, moving from logo creation and basic editing into full banner production for social media. Prior lessons helped you create and tweak images; now you’re putting those assets into a format that’s ready to publish. Next, you’ll continue building out your brand’s digital toolkit—so keep exploring to see how these methods extend to other types of visuals and platforms. Stay with the course to unlock the potential of AI-powered branding from start to finish.