Designing for a Shrinking Canvas

An interesting article about the shrinking canvas of album cover design has relevance beyond the music industry. These days, especially online, most (if not all) manufactured images will be shown small at some point... CD covers on your tiny iPod screen, book covers on Amazon, screenshots of websites, thumbnail galleries of photos... Are you considering how your work will look in miniature? Perhaps it's time to start anticipating thumbnail impact and, if necessary, infusing larger formats with even more tactile bonuses (the feel of materials, the texture of print, special packaging) that create incentive for interaction at actual size. [article via DO, where you can also read a semi-related post by Adrian Shaughnessy, where he writes: "Who ever had a love affair with a JPEG?"]

Eyecatching mini-design is also important in today's world of social networking—I've recently started to Twitter, and I'm always amazed at how uninteresting most user icons are. On the public timeline, where images are shown at 48x48 pixels, my eyes sweep past most photo-based facial icons and are caught by illustrations or typography. On profile pages, where those images shrink to 24x24 pixels within the tiny grid of friends, photos of faces often blur into visually forgettable mini tiles. This is the case on many community sites—Flickr, for example, fares slightly better than Twitter, likely because there is a higher artist quotient among general users. But any profile icon, wherever it is shown online (help forums, index and contact listings, blog comments, etc.), potentially leads people back to the user. So whatever the user intention (selling products, boosting visibility, making contacts), a well-designed icon that represents nicely at several thumbnail levels is certainly an advantage.

Are you thinking small?