Don’t forget to carefully crop images you are using in your documents and marketing materials. It is very understandable that you want to crop an image. And you should crop images. Make sure you crop out anything that is not important and a bit distracting. The main aim of pictures is to make sure the viewer understands the content. It is a bit hard to do that when it is not clear what the image is of. However, I am often surprised how often I see images that have cropped out something important.
Don’t crop out anything important
See this example:
With this image, the main aim of this picture is to show off this graphic design and how well the content fits on the page. But in the before example, the edge of the page is cut off. How is the viewer to know how well the content fits on the page when the page is quite literally cut off.
Once we make sure the whole image is in view, then we see that there is actually quite a lot of white space above the heading on the left page.
Crop out anything distracting
Be mindful of the edges, sometimes a crop is leaving a bit of an element that then becomes distracting.
In the example, the top image has cropped out some of the heading off the screen. This is important content and should not be cropped out. And on the right, the bad cropping has left a tiny bit of pink remaining and with no context, it looks like a mistake.
Once we expand out, we can see the heading and the booklet on the side. The image now makes more sense.
Carefully crop images
This tip was included in one of my Make Better Documents videos on YouTube.
