How to Make a LinkedIn Carousel, Step by Step

A LinkedIn carousel is a post the reader swipes through, one panel at a time. Making one is not really a design job — the design is the last third of the work. Most of it is deciding what you are trying to say, then cutting it down until it fits on a handful of slides. This walkthrough goes through the whole thing in order, both the manual way and the way you can do it from a chat window.

What kind of carousel am I actually making?

Before anything else, it helps to know that “carousel” on LinkedIn means two different free post types, plus a third paid thing that is easy to confuse with them.

When somebody says “LinkedIn carousel” in a normal conversation, they nearly always mean the document post — a PDF that LinkedIn turns into swipeable pages. That is what this walkthrough builds. Carousel ads are a LinkedIn Ads format, bought and targeted through the ads manager, and they are a separate job with a separate budget. Do not mix the two up when reading advice online, because the rules for one do not apply to the other.

Step 1: what is the one thing the reader should take away?

Write it as a single sentence before you open anything. Not a topic — a takeaway. “Pricing” is a topic. “Charge for the outcome, not the hours” is a takeaway. If you cannot write that sentence, the carousel is not ready to be made, and no amount of nice typography will rescue it.

This sentence does three jobs later on. It becomes the promise on your first slide, it shapes your caption, and it is the test you use when deciding whether a slide stays or goes. Anything on a slide that does not serve that sentence is filler.

A useful sanity check: if a reader saw only the first and last slide, would they still get the point? If yes, the middle is doing supporting work, which is what it should be doing. If no, you are probably covering two subjects in one post — split it into two carousels.

Step 2: how do I outline the slides?

Outline in plain text first. A notes app, a document, the back of an envelope — anywhere that is not a design tool, because design tools tempt you into decorating before you have decided anything.

One idea per slide. That is the whole rule. A slide with two ideas on it reads as a slide with none, because the reader is swiping on a phone and gives each panel a second or two at most.

A structure that holds up for most subjects:

• Slide 1 — the promise. What the reader gets, in as few words as possible.
• Slide 2 — why it matters. The problem, the cost of getting it wrong, or the thing people usually assume.
• Slides 3 to 8 — the substance. One step, one point, or one example per slide.
• Final slide — the wrap. The takeaway restated, plus one clear next step.

On length, short beats long. A tight seven-slide carousel will usually do better than a padded fifteen. Do not add slides to look thorough; cut anything you would skip yourself.

Write the actual words at this stage too, not placeholders. Then trim each slide to the fewest words that still make sense. Most first drafts lose about half their text and improve.

Step 3: what size and shape should the slides be?

Pick a shape that suits a phone held upright. Square works. Taller-than-wide, around a 4:5 portrait shape, works and fills more of the screen. Wide, landscape, presentation-shaped slides are the thing to avoid, and that gets its own section below because it is the mistake almost everyone makes first.

Two practical rules while you lay out each slide:

• Big text, few words. If you could not read it at arm’s length on a phone, it is too small. Headline-sized type, not body-copy-sized type.
• Leave a margin. Keep text well away from the edges. Different phones crop and letterbox differently, and content jammed against an edge is the first thing to feel cramped or get clipped.

Step 4: how do I export it as a PDF?

Whatever you designed in — slides software, a design tool, even a word processor — the output you want is a PDF where one page equals one slide. That is the part people get wrong: exporting handouts with several slides to a page, or exporting with speaker notes attached, produces a file LinkedIn will happily display and readers will find baffling.

Before you upload, open the PDF and check three things:

• Page one is your first slide, not a title page or a blank cover you forgot about.
• The page order matches your outline.
• Fonts have rendered the way you designed them. Missing or substituted fonts are a common surprise when a file moves between machines — embedding the fonts on export avoids it.

Keep the file reasonably small. Compress images before you place them, rather than exporting an enormous file and hoping. A smaller file also opens faster for the reader, which matters more than it sounds.

Step 5: how do I upload it to LinkedIn?

By hand, on the LinkedIn website or app: start a post, find the document option (usually behind an “add a document” control, or the more menu next to photo and video), pick your PDF, and give it a title. That title is not decoration — it appears with the post, so treat it as a second headline rather than typing a file name.

Then look at the preview before you publish. The preview is the only honest look you get at how the first page will appear in the feed, and it is where you find out that your opening slide is too busy.

Can I make and post a carousel from a chat instead?

Partly, and it is worth knowing which parts. The writing and outlining are what an AI assistant is genuinely good at: hand it your one-sentence takeaway, ask for a slide-by-slide outline, then argue with it until the slides are tight. The visual design still needs a design tool or a template.

The publishing step can happen in the chat. Kalovio is a free connector you add to Claude or ChatGPT that works through LinkedIn’s official interface; it can take a PDF you have uploaded to it and publish it as a document post, so you write the caption in the same conversation where you drafted the slides and never open LinkedIn. It handles multi-image posts of two to nine images too, if you chose that format instead.

Step 6: what goes in the caption?

The caption is not a summary of the carousel. If it summarises the carousel, nobody swipes. Its job is to make the first swipe feel worth it.

A caption that works usually opens with the tension or the claim in one or two short lines, says who the post is for, and stops. The first line or two is what shows in the feed before the “see more” cut, so front-load it and do not spend those lines on a greeting.

Add a real question at the end if you want replies — a specific one someone can answer in a sentence, not “thoughts?”. A carousel with no caption at all is allowed, and occasionally right when the slides carry everything, but it is rarely the stronger option.

What is the most common mistake?

Designing on a laptop and never checking the result on a phone. This is the one that quietly ruins otherwise good carousels, and it happens for an obvious reason: you build the slides on a big screen, at a comfortable zoom, where everything looks fine.

Most people scrolling their feed are on a phone, holding it upright. A wide landscape slide shrinks to a thin strip on that screen. Text that was comfortable at laptop size becomes a grey smudge. Three neat columns of bullet points become unreadable. The reader does not squint or pinch to zoom — they keep scrolling.

The fix costs a minute:

• Design square or portrait, never landscape.
• Put far fewer words on each slide than feels right.
• Use large, high-contrast type — dark on light or light on dark, not mid-grey on light grey.
• Before publishing, open the PDF on your actual phone and read it at normal holding distance. If any slide makes you lean in, fix that slide.

That last check catches nearly everything: type too small, contrast too weak, a slide too crowded, an important line pushed to the edge.

A short checklist before you post

• One sentence says what the reader takes away.
• One idea per slide, and every slide earns its place.
• Square or portrait, generous margins, large type.
• PDF exported one page per slide, correct order, fonts embedded.
• Read on a phone at arm’s length, with no squinting.
• A document title that reads like a headline.
• A caption whose first two lines earn the swipe.

Work through that in order and the carousel will be better than most — not because of the design, but because you decided what it was for before you started decorating it.