Choosing and optimizing a logo for social media profiles
We want to start this post off with a disclaimer: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms are always subject to change, and their design choices will always have the final say over how your content looks.
If you've ever set up a Facebook page for your brand, you probably know the choice paralysis of which logo file to use, or the nagging feeling that you could make it look just slightly better.
While things like file size, image quality, and technical specs are not under our control, there are some ways we can influnce what our customer sees as they scroll through their feed.
Contrast
Choose a version of your logo with colors that are part of your brand. If you have multiple color options to choose from, you usually want to opt for one with greater light/dark contrast. White on black or black on white are always acceptable.
Proportions
If your logo was well-crafted with versatility in mind, you'll have multiple options to choose from when it comes to the layout and proportions of the mark itself.
Choose a version of the logo with the closest 1-to-1 aspect ratio.
The closer the width and height are, the better the mark will fit into the prescribed circle we have to work with. Brands with only a wordmark to often find a creative way to condense it, or use a photographic image instead of a logo.
Cropping
While making the logo bigger doesn't solve most problems, social media platforms are adding their own padding around your page's logo. Shrunk down onto a phone screen among many other tiny images, we ususally want our logo to take up a little more real estate than usual.
File format
These platforms apply their own compression and resizing to everything you upload, in order to give their users a fast loading and scrolling experience. Lossless image formats retain their quality to being scaled up, decoded/re-encoded, and modified. PNG and TIFF are two common lossless formats.
If you have a .PNG or .WebP version of the logo available to you, this will usually look sharper after uploading and being resized by the platform you're using.
Let's review:
Before we wrap up, we want to say that what the customer wants is always the trump card. If a brand knows exactly what is attractive to their customers, they should disregard some or all of this advice!
Here's what we covered:
- Use a square-ish version of the logo
- Increase contrast
- Crop tightly
- Upload in a lossless file format
We hope these tips help you make your brand stand out and stick around on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and everywhere else it happens to be!
At the end of the day, no amount of optimization will help if your current branding isn't working.
If you need help with a logo (plus the other important parts of a brand identity), email us here. We'll be happy to consult.