Midjourney Aspect Ratio & Stylize Cheatsheet

A travel agency selling Iceland tours keeps re-cropping the same hero photo. The vertical story banner chops off the waterfall, the wide website hero cuts the guide out of frame, and the Pinterest pin looks like a stretched screenshot. The images are not the problem; the aspect ratio and the stylize value were never chosen for the placement they had to fill.

Two parameters do most of the work when you generate Midjourney images for a campaign: –ar sets the frame, and –stylize sets how much artistic license the model takes. This cheatsheet pairs them per placement, then gives a prompt snippet for each combination and the trade-offs. The running example is the same throughout: an Iceland tour operator building a set of social and web banners from one northern-lights scene. For parameter basics, see the style parameter guide and the Midjourney prompt guide.

Placement Decision Table

Read the table as a pairing, not two separate choices. A high stylize value in a narrow story crop usually produces a beautiful image with no clean area for a headline, while a low stylize value in a wide hero can look flat. Match the frame to where the image will live first, then dial style to fit the placement’s mood.

What Each Stylize Band Does

The default stylize value is around 100. Raising it makes the model decorate the scene; lowering it makes the model describe the scene. For a tour operator, the safe working range is 100 to 400. Above 500 the image stops looking like Iceland and starts looking like a painting of Iceland, which is fine for a mood board and risky for a landing page that must promise a real place.

Prompt Snippets by Combination

Vertical Story, literal (9:16, stylize 200)

northern lights over a black volcanic ridge, a lone guide with a headlamp in the lower third, foreground open for a caption, wide sky, cold blue and green tones, shot on a 24mm lens, natural night sky, photographic
--ar 9:16 --stylize 200 --v 7

Wide website hero, cinematic (21:9, stylize 300)

panoramic Iceland glacier lagoon at dusk, icebergs across the frame, mountains on the horizon, cinematic anamorphic look, soft mist, one small figure for scale, deep teal and violet light, editorial travel photography
--ar 21:9 --stylize 300 --v 7

Instagram feed, editorial (4:5, stylize 350)

traveller in a yellow rain jacket standing on a basalt beach, black sand, foaming surf, overcast light, shallow depth of field, muted palette with one bright accent, travel magazine style, clean upper third for text
--ar 4:5 --stylize 350 --v 7

Pinterest pin, stylized (2:3, stylize 450)

Icelandic turf house under a green aurora, long exposure, glowing sky, storybook mood, rich colors, gentle grain, vertical composition with the roofline low so a title can sit above
--ar 2:3 --stylize 450 --v 7

Wide email banner, literal (3:1, stylize 150)

aerial view of a glacial river delta, braided channels across black sand, top-down, high contrast, minimal, no people, letterbox banner composition
--ar 3:1 --stylize 150 --v 7

Trade-Offs

Wide ratios give you a cinematic banner but starve the image of vertical room, so a subject that needs headroom — a standing figure, a tall waterfall — gets clipped. Tall ratios do the opposite: they are perfect for stories and pins but waste detail when cropped into a link card. The fix is to generate the vertical and the wide version separately rather than cropping one master, because a crop is not a composition. Add the ratio to the prompt first and describe the layout with it, not after.

Stylize is the second lever, and it interacts with ratio. A 21:9 frame at stylize 700 is often a gorgeous abstract with no clear place for text; the same scene at stylize 250 leaves sky for a headline. Budget your attention too: stylized output tends to carry more texture and more artifacts, which means more upscales and more retries. When you need ten banners fast for an Iceland promotion, keep stylize between 150 and 350, fix the ratio per placement, and only push past 500 for one signature pin. Reuse the same seed across ratios if you want the different crops to look like one campaign instead of five unrelated photos.

Building One Campaign From the Same Scene

Once the placement table is set, keep a single subject and vary only the ratio and the stylize value. Describe the scene once — northern lights over a black volcanic ridge at dusk, one guide for scale, cold blue and green tones — then append a different parameter pair for each size. Ask the model to hold the description constant and change only the frame, which keeps the campaign looking like one trip rather than five stock photos.

Using ONLY the scene description below, produce 4 image prompts for one Iceland campaign. Keep every descriptive word identical and change only the closing parameters and the composition notes:
Scene: northern lights over a black volcanic ridge at dusk, one guide with a headlamp for scale, cold blue and green tones, photographic.
Variants:
1) Instagram Story --ar 9:16 --stylize 200, open lower third for a caption.
2) Website hero --ar 21:9 --stylize 300, put the ridge on the right third.
3) Pinterest pin --ar 2:3 --stylize 450, roofline low, title space on top.
4) Email banner --ar 3:1 --stylize 150, letterbox, no people.
Return the four prompts only.

Reusing one seed across the variants is the fastest way to make the four frames feel related. If the Story and the hero share a seed, the sky and the ridge line stay recognizable even at different widths, and a visitor who taps from a story to the site recognizes the same trip.

Sources & Notes

Parameter behavior described for Midjourney v6 and v7 as documented in October 2026: –ar accepts ratios from 1:1 up to roughly 1:4 and 4:1, and –stylize runs from 0 to 1000 with a default near 100. The Iceland tour operator and its banners are an illustrative scenario; no images were generated for publication, and all prompts are copy-paste text for the reader’s own Midjourney account. Category mapping follows the guunn.com AI Prompts plan (Midjourney = 958).