Social media post design with AI: a workflow that keeps the brand

Social media post design with AI works when the brand comes first and the AI comes second. Build a small set of templates from the brand guide, fix the sizes for each platform, and then use AI for the parts that eat time: backgrounds, scenes, variations and first drafts of captions. The logo, the Arabic type, the offer and the final check stay with a designer.

Done the other way round, starting from a prompt each morning, you get a feed of attractive pictures that look like a different brand every day. Followers stop recognising you, and the brand guide becomes a PDF nobody opens.

This guide covers the template kit, the official sizes for each platform (checked in October 2026), where AI helps, Arabic type, a calendar for the Arab year, batch production, captions and alt text, and honest labelling. It is part of my series on AI video and voice, which starts with the AI video generator guide, because many of these posts end up as Reels.

Start from the brand guide, not from a prompt

A brand guide is usually written for logos, letterheads and signs. A feed needs it turned into a few working templates. Before any AI tool opens, build a social kit:

• A grid and margins for each format, with a fixed place for the logo.
• Type styles for headline, offer, price and small print, in Arabic and in English, at sizes that still read on a phone.
• Colour rules: which colour leads, which supports, and which is kept for prices or calls to action.
• An image style in a few words, plus three or four reference images. This becomes the core of every image prompt.
• Three to five layouts that cover most posts: an offer, a product, a tip, an announcement, an occasion.
• Safe areas for each platform, where nothing important is placed.

The Abdeen Coffee project page shows what this looks like in a real campaign. The Cairo roastery has a hand-drawn Arabic mark built like a seal, and a simple system around it: green, lime and a warm cream, with a clear geometric Arabic face for supporting text. The social work on the page runs from offers on each blend to match-day posts around Al Ahly games (including a derby contest and a winners' post), a New Year 2026 set, and story versions of the same offers. The occasions are very different, and the brand is recognisable in every one, because the system sets the frame before anything else does.

That frame is where AI has to work.

Official sizes for each platform (checked October 2026)

Size cheat sheets get copied from blog to blog and drift away from the platforms' own pages. These come from each platform's help centre in October 2026. They change, so check the source again before a large campaign.

In practice, three master formats cover most of this: a portrait feed post at 1080 × 1350 (4:5, inside Instagram's range and Meta's feed ratios), a vertical 1080 × 1920 (9:16) for Stories, Reels, TikTok and Snapchat, and a square 1080 × 1080 for places that still crop to squares.

Keep the headline and the offer near the middle of the frame, away from the top and bottom, where each app places its own buttons and captions. Instagram's profile grid also shows a cropped preview, so a headline pushed to the edge can disappear there. For Arabic campaigns on TikTok, download the Arabic-region safe-zone file rather than the standard one.

Where AI earns its place

Backgrounds and scenes

Most posts need a setting: a table in morning light, a Ramadan evening, a stadium mood for match day. This is where image tools help most. Generate the scene with no text in it and a planned empty area for the headline, and use the image style and references from your kit, so every scene belongs to the same family.

Keep the product real. Start from a product photo or a 3D render and change the setting around it, instead of letting a model redraw the pack. When a scene has to stretch into a taller format, I explain how in Photoshop Generative Fill.

Variations inside the system

Once a template works, AI helps you explore around it: three colourways of a background, several crops of a scene, a Ramadan and an Eid version of the same layout. Ask for variations of something you made, not for a new design every time.

Copy drafts

A chat assistant is good at first drafts: ten hooks for an offer, a caption in a warmer tone, a shorter line for a story. Treat them as drafts. Facts, prices and dates come from the client, never from the model.

Arabic needs the most care. A generated Arabic caption can read like a translation, and the register matters. Abdeen's posts speak in Cairo's own words («ساعة لمزاجك» for happy hour, «مبروك للفايزين» for the winners), which a generic draft would not choose.

Resizing

Many tools now help adapt one design to other formats, from Canva's resize tools to Generative Expand in Photoshop. Treat the result as a start. Check that the logo kept its clear space and that the headline did not slide into a safe area.

Set the Arabic type yourself

Image models still write Arabic badly, and I explain why in Arabic text in AI images. For social posts the rule is short: the model makes the picture, and every Arabic word is set as live type in Canva, Photoshop or Figma.

A few details matter on a phone screen:

• Prices and numbers. Decide once which digits the brand uses in posts and keep them. Then check that a price inside an Arabic sentence sits in the right order.
• Latin names inside Arabic. An English product name inside an Arabic line changes direction. Read it in the final layout, not only in the text box.
• Weight and size. Thin Arabic weights vanish over a busy image. Use a medium or bold weight for headlines, and give Arabic lines more height than Latin.
• One register per post. Formal Arabic suits a national day; the local dialect suits a café's daily post. Mixing them by accident sounds wrong to every reader.

A content calendar for the Arab year

Occasions shape much of a brand's feed in the region. Plan them early, design each occasion template once, and reuse it every year with fresh images.

Hijri dates move by about eleven days each year, and the final dates depend on official announcements, so confirm them a few weeks before.

Batch production: one session, many posts

Producing posts one by one, each in a hurry, is how a feed loses its consistency. A monthly batch keeps it:

1. Plan the month. One line per post: occasion, offer, format, platform.
2. Write and approve the copy first, in Arabic and English, with prices and dates from the client.
3. Generate the images in one sitting, with the same references and style words, so the month looks like one family.
4. Place them in the templates, set the type, and use the real logo file every time.
5. Export every format with clear names: date, platform, ratio, language.
6. Check each post on a real phone, then schedule.

A batch also gives the client one approval round instead of thirty. It is the same lesson the AI video series I direct at SkillUp MENA (AI Video Studio) teaches: AI tools are useful in a chain, and a series only holds together when the references and decisions are fixed before generation starts.

Captions and alt text

A good caption puts the hook in the first line, then the offer and its dates, then one clear call to action. Write the Arabic and the English captions for their own readers rather than translating one into the other. AI drafts help here, as long as a person writes the final version.

Alt text is the description a screen reader reads aloud, and it is easy to skip. Instagram lets you write it under Advanced settings before you post, or edit it later, replacing the automatic alt text. X adds it through the +ALT button, with up to 1,000 characters. Three habits worth keeping:

• Write the alt text in the language of the post.
• If the offer only exists inside the image, repeat it in the alt text. A screen reader cannot read words painted into pixels.
• Describe what the image shows, not the prompt that made it.

Label AI images honestly

Platform rules, as each company describes them in October 2026:

• TikTok says it requires creators to label realistic AI-generated content, and it reads Content Credentials to label some AI content automatically.
• YouTube asks creators to disclose content that is meaningfully altered or synthetic and looks realistic.
• Meta shows an "AI info" label on Facebook, Instagram and Threads when it detects industry-standard signals or when the person posting discloses it.

The rules are the minimum. A realistic scene of a shop that does not exist, or a product moment that never happened, misleads customers even when no rule catches it. Label realistic AI images, never generate fake customers, reviews or before-and-after results, and leave Content Credentials in place when a tool adds them. On the Kababgy Al-Sultan project page, the scenes made with AI around the real designs are labelled as AI scenes. A one-word label costs nothing and keeps the brand's word worth something.

Conclusion

Social posts with AI stay on-brand when the order is right: brand guide, templates, sizes, copy, then images. Let AI speed up backgrounds, variations and drafts. Keep the Arabic type, the facts and the final check in human hands, plan the year's occasions early, produce in batches, write real alt text, and label what is generated.

If you want a social kit built from your brand, ready for a team that uses AI as a tool, start a project here.