Prompts for Profile Avatars - Nano Banana 2

The most common failure is a beautiful full-body composition that becomes an unreadable smudge once it is cropped. If you prompt for a scene, the platform will crop the scene, and it will crop it to the middle. Prompt for what you want left after the crop.

Ask for a head-and-shoulders crop, subject centred, facing the camera or in a slight three-quarter turn. Say the head occupies most of the frame. That sounds obvious, but it is precisely the instruction people leave out, and without it models default to a comfortable medium shot with a lot of air around the subject.

The other half of that decision is separation. The subject has to be clearly lighter or darker than what is behind it, otherwise the silhouette dissolves. A rim light or a simple two-tone contrast between subject and ground does more for legibility at small size than any amount of facial detail.

Detailed photorealistic faces lose almost everything when scaled down; the features that made them convincing are precisely the ones that disappear first. Illustrated and graphic approaches survive much better, because they are built from larger shapes to begin with. Flat vector, bold ink linework, cut-paper, low-poly, thick-brush painting — all of these hold their identity in a small circle.