Make Sure Your Logo is Usable on Your Social Networking Profiles

For most organizations these days, having a presence on various social networks is a necessity, but a common issue is the limitations of how an organization can display its logo on these sites.

Most social networks constrain the proportions of an avatar/profile picture to small, often square-shaped spaces. This can present a problem if your logo is set up in a more horizontal presentation (a fairly common setup when designing for print materials and website headers). This forces you to either severely reduce the size of your logo to fit into the small space, rendering it microscopic and illegible, or select a portion of the logo that fits into the limited space, which often means cutting out parts of the logo.

How do you get around this issue? There are a few ways to do so, and this post from The Logo Factory does a great job of explaining them and offering examples of some logos that do it right and some that would run into problems. Here are a few of their suggestions:

• Make sure that any imagery used in your logo can be used on its own, without any accompanying typography in the logo. This allows you to pull out the image from the logo (assuming it’s more square-shape friendly) and use it for your avatars and profile pictures without having to include text that will inevitably have to be shrunk down to unreadable size.

• Request the logo design be suitable for a square shape from the outset. This will allow the designer to develop a concept that works for all materials, including social media sites.

You want people to recognize that your Facebook, YouTube and Flickr pages belong to you, so make sure your logo represents your organization the way you want it to be seen, rather than a miniaturized/cropped shell of the logo that once was.

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