From the course: Learning Graphic Design: Techniques

Extreme photo cropping

From the course: Learning Graphic Design: Techniques

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Extreme photo cropping

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So, I'm in the checkout line, and I see a technique that will be familiar to most of you. And that's the extreme cropping on the narrow banner on the top of this beverage cooler. What I want to point out is how much visual information can be conveyed with super tight cropping. Pay attention to the huge Coca-Cola bottle. Instead of shrinking it to fit that space, they've left the bottle huge and just cropped in on the most important part, which is the name. What's interesting though, in that doing that, you can see the shape of the bottle, the water drops on the bottle, the ribbing of the bottle, the beverage inside the bottle, you can see the surface of the bottle, everything you need to know to convey that coke bottle. Although, you're seeing only a tiny fraction of it. The most obvious place for this technique is on a web banner. When you're designing a web banner, it might help to think of it not as a sign board with discrete edges, that you have to paint within. But rather as a window to a larger world. And visualize yourself looking through blinds to that world. Crop that way, place it in your banner, add your name, and you have a great result pretty easily. Look how much visual information is being conveyed in this slice. You have a needle and thread, a measuring tape, buttons, the colors, the textures, the general ambiance of the whole photo. You can get pretty extreme with this. Key is always to pick out the most expressive sliver of an image. This could be a fun exercise. Here, we have a star, we have a blue field, a little bit of red strip, a little bit of white stripe, and with no more than those you can see the flag. You can see the texture, the fabric, there's the age of the flag, and even the stitching are all conveyed in that narrow space. So, here's the take away, when you need a narrow image, instead of thinking small, think about big and full sized, viewed through blinds.

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