A blank card, not a screenshot
This is the empty version: no sample name, no placeholder text, no borrowed numbers. You get the card structure and fill in whatever you need.
That is the difference between a template and a generator. A generator hands you something plausible and asks you to edit it, which is faster when you want a realistic mockup. A template hands you nothing and gets out of the way, which is what you want when the card is going into a deck, a design file, a course slide or a landing page, and every field will be replaced anyway.
What designers and writers use it for
Four things come up again and again.
- Slide decks, where a post card illustrates a point about social proof, launches or community without screenshotting a real person
- Landing pages, as a testimonial or announcement mockup before the real one exists
- Course and tutorial material, where you need an illustration you own outright rather than a screenshot with unclear rights
- Design comps, to show a client what their announcement will look like in context
In all four the content is placeholder anyway, so starting from an empty card saves you deleting someone else's.
Getting the proportions right
The card is drawn at 600 pixels wide, which is close to how a post renders in a timeline on a desktop, and exported at double that so it holds up when scaled.
Two settings are worth thinking about rather than accepting. The theme, because a light card on a dark slide reads as pasted in, and the metrics row, which you can switch off entirely. An empty template with a metrics row showing zeros looks broken; without the row it just looks like a fresh post.
If your text is long, check it against the real limit before you build the card. A template will happily draw 500 characters that X would never let you publish.
Ownership and rights
Everything the card contains comes from you: your text, your avatar or a generated one, your numbers. Nothing is scraped from a real account, so there is no third party with a claim over the result and no photograph of a real person you would need permission for.
That is usually the reason people want a template rather than a screenshot in the first place. A screenshot of a real post carries the author's rights and the platform's; a card you filled in yourself does not.
The template is the easy part
An empty post card takes two minutes to fill. Knowing what to put in it, and who is going to read it, takes rather longer.
That second half is what squidX does: it watches X for people describing the problem your product solves, scores each one against your ideal customer profile, and hands you a ranked shortlist every morning of the conversations worth joining. Build your template here, then go find the people it is meant to reach.
