When you edit a short, you see a clean 9:16 frame. Nobody else ever does. On Reels, TikTok and Shorts, the app lays its own interface over your video: a bar at the top, the account name and post caption at the bottom, the audio label, and a column of like, comment and share buttons down the right side.
So where captions sit isn’t only a style choice. It decides whether people can read them at all. Most editors know this, and the usual advice is to keep text inside a “safe zone”. The question I got wrong for a while was what to do about that column on the right. This post is about that mistake and how I place captions now.
What the apps actually cover
There’s no single official map for organic posts, and the layout shifts between app versions, devices and how long the post caption is. The clearest numbers come from the ad specs, which are a good guide for normal posts too.
- Meta tells advertisers to keep text and logos out of roughly the top 14%, the bottom 35% and 6% on each side of a 9:16 Reels video.
- TikTok tells advertisers to stay within the safe zone so important information isn’t hidden by the buttons or the caption. Its templates change with the caption length, because a longer caption pushes the overlay higher.
On a 1080×1920 frame, that leaves a band through the middle of the screen where text is reliably visible. The bottom third is the most crowded part of the screen, and it’s exactly where a lot of editors put captions out of habit from horizontal video.
The case for offset captions
If the button column sits on the right, the obvious move is to shift everything left. For a while that was my default. On a 1080-pixel-wide canvas, the true centre is x=540. My captions and headlines were centred at x=495 instead, nudged left so long lines would clear the Instagram buttons.
It sounded careful. It was based on the real interface. And the first creator who saw it asked me to change it.
What a creator taught me
The channel was a Serbian diaspora interview series: street and event interviews, lots of energy, a headline above the video and captions below it. When the creator gave feedback on our first set, one of the requests was simple. Centre both the headline and the captions.
I had inferred the offset from the interface. He judged it from how the shorts looked. And when I looked at them again with his eyes, he was right, for a few reasons:
- The interface isn’t always there. Each app’s layout is a little different, and on a desktop browser, in a review link, in a cover frame or in a reposted clip, there’s no button column at all. Without the buttons to explain it, an offset caption just looks slightly off, like a mistake.
- Centred reads as intentional. To me, a centred block looks designed. A block that sits 45 pixels to the left looks like someone dragged it by accident.
- Offset doesn’t solve the real problem. The buttons only cover text that runs too wide. A long line shifted left can still clip the right column. A short line that’s centred never reaches it.
So we moved everything back to the true centre and fixed the actual cause instead: the width of the text.
How I place captions now
Centred horizontally, narrow enough to clear the buttons. I keep generous side margins and cap the line width rather than moving the block. On that same interview series, the headline lines are limited to 810 pixels, which keeps them inside 135-pixel margins on each side. Captions are shorter still: two to four words per chunk, which I explained in the post on highlighting words. Short chunks are easier to read anyway, so the safe zone and readability point the same way.
Vertically, around chest height. For a single speaker filling the frame, I usually put captions a little below the middle of the screen, over the speaker’s chest. It’s clear of the bottom overlay, close to the face so the eye doesn’t travel far, and it doesn’t cover the mouth. On one street-interview series I edited for, the yellow caps captions sit at about 57% of the frame height, right in that band.
Hook text in the top third, but not at the very top. On a fitness creator’s trial, an early version had the opening title at about y=95 on a 1920-pixel frame. My review note was one line: is this title in the safe zone? It wasn’t. The app’s top bar sits right there. The rule I wrote down afterwards for that creator: no hook text above roughly y=250, nothing over his face, captions ending above roughly y=1500, and nothing in the right-hand 140 pixels where the buttons live.
Faces first. The safe zone is a frame, not a template. If the speaker leans forward and their chin moves into the caption band, the captions move, not the face. I check caption placement against faces on every shot, not just on the first frame.
When off-centre is the right call
None of this means captions must always sit dead centre. There are good reasons to move them:
- The creator’s own style. If a channel already places captions somewhere specific, I match it. On a TV-commentary project, the reference channel we were matching moves its captions around the frame instead of keeping them in one fixed spot, so a locked position was the wrong choice there. Matching the style matters more than my default.
- Stacked layouts. When two people share the screen, one on top of the other, the natural place for captions is the seam between the two panels, close to both faces. I wrote about that in the two-speaker layouts post.
- Something important in the middle. If the clip is about an object, a chart or a move happening at chest height, the captions go above or below it, still inside the safe band.
What I don’t do any more is shift everything a fixed amount to the left as a blanket rule. If text is at risk from the buttons, the fix is shorter lines, not a lopsided layout.
A quick checklist
Before a short goes out, I check:
- Is every caption and title inside the middle band, away from the top bar and the bottom overlay?
- Are lines short enough that, centred, they never reach the right-hand buttons?
- Is the hook text below the app’s top bar?
- Do captions ever cover a mouth or a chin, on any shot?
- Does the short still look balanced with no interface on top, on YouTube, desktop or a cover frame?
- Does the placement match how the creator already does it?
The easiest test is to put a safe-zone overlay over the export, or simply post a private test and look at it on a phone. Things that look fine on an editing monitor often don’t survive the real app.
If you’d like to see one of your own videos cut and captioned this way, I can make a free short from one of your videos. You keep it either way.