One template, every aspect ratio

Ask a designer what they actually spend the week on and the answer is rarely designing. It is resizing. The same card at 1:1 for the feed, 4:5 because it performs better, 9:16 for the story — and then the headline runs long on one of them and the crop eats the logo.

The usual fix is three files. Three files drift. Six weeks later nobody can tell you which is current.

A template is a layer tree, not an image

A HyperContent template is structured data: a tree of layers, each with position, type, styling, and a declaration of whether an editor is allowed to touch it.

That last part is the whole idea. The designer decides which layers become fillable inputs — a headline, a photo, a kicker — and everything else is locked. An editor filling in a breaking story at 18:00 cannot pick the wrong weight, cannot nudge the logo, cannot substitute a colour that is almost the brand colour. Not because they have been told not to, but because the interface does not offer it.

Guidelines in a PDF describe the intended outcome. Constraints in the tool produce it.

Aspects reflow instead of cropping

A template declares which aspect ratios it supports, and per-layer anchors describe how each layer behaves as the frame changes. Move from 1:1 to 9:16 and the layout reflows: the elements anchored to the bottom stay at the bottom, the headline block keeps its relationship to the image, the safe margins hold.

The alternative — rendering one canvas and cropping it three ways — is what produces the beheaded subject and the clipped wordmark. Cropping does not know what matters in the frame. Anchors do, because a designer told them.

Layouts that can do arithmetic

Some problems cannot be solved with anchors alone. A caption box that has to sit under a headline needs to know how tall the headline turned out, and the headline is not known until an editor types it.

So layer properties can reference each other. A value can be an expression — {{title.x + 20}} — reading from another layer, doing arithmetic, calling a small set of functions. The layout computes itself against the actual content rather than against the content the designer happened to mock up with.

The engine has two properties worth stating because they are the ones that matter at 18:00: a reference cycle is frozen rather than followed, and an expression that cannot be evaluated returns a sensible value rather than throwing. A template that renders slightly wrong is a problem. A template that fails to render is a missed bulletin.

Video is video

Video templates render server-side to a real H.264 MP4 — frames drawn through the same layer engine, then encoded with ffmpeg. Not a stack of stills with a crossfade applied in the browser, which is what "video templates" often means and which platforms treat accordingly.

Text-only destinations skip rendering altogether. A post going to X and Threads does not wait on an image neither of them will show.

The snapshot rule

This is the least visible decision in the pipeline and the one that prevents the worst class of bug.

When a post is created, the template is frozen onto it. Not referenced — copied. A designer who edits the master template tomorrow changes nothing about the forty posts already sitting in the queue.

Consider the alternative for a moment. A designer tweaks a corner radius on Tuesday. Every scheduled post silently re-renders. Something that was approved on Monday goes out on Wednesday looking different, and nobody knows until someone screenshots it. Presets behave the same way for the same reason: applied by copy, not by reference.

The general rule is that approval should mean something. If a thing was approved, the thing that publishes should be the thing that was approved.

Photoshop still works

None of this requires abandoning the tools designers already use. A PSD imports with its layers preserved, through a wizard that turns the ones you nominate into editor-fillable inputs. The design process does not have to move for the output to become governable.

What it adds up to

One template. Every aspect ratio the destination needs. Stills and video from the same source. Locked where it matters, open where it should be, and frozen at the moment someone said yes.

Which mostly means the designer gets their week back.