# LinkedIn Cover Photo: What to Put There When You're Just Starting Out Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking/linkedin-cover-photo/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking/linkedin-cover-photo.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving networking at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer A LinkedIn cover photo is 1584 x 396 px. Here's what to actually put in it when you don't have clients, a logo, or a track record yet. ## Key facts - Title: LinkedIn Cover Photo: What to Put There When You're Just Starting Out - Category: Networking - Primary skill: Networking - Related skills: Influence, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: linkedin cover photo - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking/linkedin-cover-photo/ ## What this page covers - A LinkedIn cover photo is 1584 x 396 px. Here's what to actually put in it when you don't have clients, a logo, or a track record yet. - Practical guidance for linkedin cover photo - How this topic connects to Networking ## Detailed explanation A LinkedIn cover photo is the wide banner that sits behind your profile picture, and the size to use is 1584 x 396 pixels. The best ones do a single job: they tell whoever lands on your profile, in about a second, what you work on or where you are heading. One clear message beats a beautiful, crowded image every time. Which is roughly where most advice stops being useful. Search for ideas and you get gallery after gallery of taglines along the lines of "Helping businesses increase revenue through data-driven marketing strategies" — written for consultants with clients to win. If you are finishing a degree or eighteen months into a first job, you have the same empty rectangle and none of that material to fill it with. There is a good answer to that, and it isn't a template. ## What size should a LinkedIn cover photo be? The specification is consistent across sources and hasn't moved in years: 1584 x 396 pixels, a 4:1 ratio, 8 MB maximum. LinkedIn's own image guidance lists JPG, PNG and GIF as accepted formats — worth knowing that an animated GIF renders as a static first frame for many viewers, so the animation is a gamble rather than a feature. The number that actually decides whether your banner works, though, is the one nobody mentions: the safe zone. Your [profile photo](/knowledge/networking/linkedin-profile-photo/) sits on top of the bottom-left corner of the banner, and on phones LinkedIn crops the left and right edges aggressively. Design guides put the reliably visible area at roughly the central 1350 x 220 pixels. With more than 60% of LinkedIn traffic happening on mobile, according to the design-focused sources covering this, that crop is the normal viewing experience rather than the exception. This is why so many banners fail quietly. You build it on a laptop at full width, it looks balanced, and the person viewing it on a train sees your name sliced in half. Anything you centered survives. Anything you tucked into a corner is gone, and you will never see it happen. ## Eight LinkedIn cover photo ideas that work without a track record The entries below are ordered from the most useful for someone early in their career to the most risky. None of them require design software or a budget. ### Name your field, not your value proposition The dominant pattern in every idea gallery is the value-proposition line: who you help, and how. It works — for people with a service to sell. The version that works without clients is narrower and more honest: name the area you work in or are moving into, and where. A final-year student writing "Data analytics — final-year student, Copenhagen" has told [a recruiter](/knowledge/networking/how-to-optimize-your-linkedin-profile/) three useful things and claimed nothing they can't back up. The claim you can defend in the first conversation is always the stronger one. ### Three or four skills, spelled out A short row of [specific capabilities](/knowledge/self-awareness/list-of-strengths/) gives a visitor something concrete to react to, and sources recommend it precisely because it doesn't require a portfolio. The catch is specificity: "communication, teamwork, problem-solving" is what everyone writes and therefore says nothing, while "Python, SQL, Tableau — plus three years of front-of-house" is a person. If you find yourself unsure which of your skills are genuinely worth naming, that hesitation is worth resolving before you design anything — [checking which skills are strongest](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) makes the banner decision take five minutes instead of an afternoon. ### Where you are A city skyline, a recognizable campus, a local landmark. This is the most-cited non-text option in the research, and it answers a question every recruiter silently has — are you here? — while giving [a new contact](/knowledge/networking/linkedin-connection-message-examples/) an easy opening line. It also carries no risk of overclaiming, which is exactly why it suits a profile that is still thin. ### Your actual workspace A real desk, a lab bench, a workshop, a kitchen pass, a studio. Writing in Forbes, Joseph Liu frames the background image as visual support for your professional identity rather than decoration, and a real workspace does that more efficiently than any stock photo. Note the word real: the generic desk-with-plant-and-coffee image is the version that fails, because a viewer has seen it four hundred times and it tells them nothing about you. ### A single deliberate color Choosing a plain color band is not the same as leaving the default, and the difference is visible. The most commonly named mistake in banner advice is keeping LinkedIn's stock background, on the reasoning that visitors don't read it as "no banner" — they read it as "hasn't bothered," and then quietly extend that inference to your attention to detail generally. A flat color in a shade you picked clears that in thirty seconds, with zero design risk. ### Something you're part of outside the job A society, a team, a cause, volunteering. One of the sources makes the useful point that this communicates your values and how you work with people without you having to write a word about it — which matters when your job history is short and can't carry that signal on its own. ### One message, not a résumé Every mistake list in the research converges on the same rule: a banner is a billboard, not a brochure. The failure mode named repeatedly is cramming services, awards, contact details, and a paragraph of positioning into one image. The constraint is physical rather than aesthetic — at phone scale the banner is a couple of centimeters tall, so anything longer than about six words is skipped rather than read. Pick the one thing you want remembered and let the rest of the profile do its job. ### A quote — the option most likely to backfire Sources allow quotes but attach a sharp warning: vague or overused ones actively cost you credibility, and specificity is what separates a line that lands from filler. Apply a simple test before you use one. If the sentence could sit on anyone else's banner without changing a word, it is decoration, not information. Most quotes fail that test, which is why this entry sits last. ## You are allowed to change it One more thing the idea galleries get right, almost by accident. The moments they list as natural triggers for updating your banner — a new job, a new title, a promotion, an award — establish something useful: the banner is expected to move as you do. It is not a permanent declaration of who you are. It is what you're working on at the moment, and in six months it can say something else entirely. That takes most of the pressure out of the decision you are currently stuck on. ## The skills behind a profile people respond to Read back over those eight options and none of them are really design problems. Every one is a judgment call about what you can credibly claim, who you are talking to, and what reads as appropriate in a professional setting. Those judgments show up far beyond your profile. **Networking** is the obvious one, though not in the way LinkedIn markets it. Real professional relationships are built through genuine connection and by being useful to people before you need anything — the profile just does the introductory work while you sleep. Your banner is the first thing a former classmate or a dormant contact sees when your request lands in their notifications. It buys you the benefit of the doubt; it does not replace the follow-up message or the reason you got in touch. **Influence** is what the banner is quietly attempting. In the sense that matters here — getting and applying it — influence is built on being known for something specific and then delivering on it, a reputation you can stand behind rather than a positioning statement. That is the whole argument for naming your actual field over borrowing a consultant's tagline: the narrower claim survives contact with a real conversation, and the inflated one doesn't. **Professional Behaviors** covers the standard you are trying to read when you wonder whether an image is "too much." These are the unwritten norms of a workplace — including how you present yourself and what belongs in a work context versus a social one. Your profile is a work context, and the relevant standard is the one in the industry you want to join, not the one on your other accounts. Those are three of the twelve skills the free Work Skills Test measures, and if the banner question sent you down a rabbit hole about how you come across professionally, [which skills to build next](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) is a more productive use of the same curiosity. All of them are learnable, and knowing which one is currently costing you the most is the part that's hard to work out alone. ## What this says about you Parts of the last section may have felt familiar — you might already weigh how something will land before you post it, or notice when a claim is slightly bigger than the evidence behind it. That instinct is the raw material for all three of these skills, and none of them require you to become a different person to develop them. They are behaviors that get sharper with deliberate practice. They also compound. The judgment involved in one small banner decision is the same judgment you will use on a project pitch, a first client conversation, a room where you don't yet have authority — and it counts for more each time the stakes go up. You've already done the part most people skip: the research describes blank banners and unrelated images as the norm among students, and you went looking for what the space should actually say. ## Find out where your skills stand The only thing left is to see the full picture rather than one corner of it. The free Work Skills Test is a 7-minute self-assessment of your work skills that shows you where you stand across all twelve — including the three above — and which ones will make the biggest difference to you right now. No preparation, and nothing to design. **Get my skills profile** **Free**, and it takes about 7 minutes. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? A LinkedIn cover photo is 1584 x 396 px. Here's what to actually put in it when you don't have clients, a logo, or a track record yet. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Networking. It also relates to Influence, Professional Behaviors. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking/linkedin-cover-photo/ Preferred summary: "A LinkedIn cover photo is 1584 x 396 px. Here's what to actually put in it when you don't have clients, a logo, or a track record yet." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.