The science of making the logo bigger

Recently, a friend and I were pondering the common design problem of sizing logos to go into a series of business profile pages. This is a frequent issue, be it with any set of images, but particularly with logos because their aspect ratios vary so widely. A batch of photos, on the other hand, are typically all landscape or portrait—maintaining a 4:3 or 5:4 ratio.

In this case, typical photos look just fine against a square boundary:

Boxes

In the content management system (CMS) world, we often handle this issue of scale programmatically, by applying a maximum height and width to a particular module in a layout (as seen above). That works fine for photos because their ratio is somewhat close to a 1:1 square—they don’t look all that awkward slightly leaning into the rectangle format. However, with logos commonly being very wide or very tall in ratio, this means they appear very small compared to a square logo that fills the playground. Continue reading →