A while ago I discussed on Collective Thoughts some of the techniques for getting your site into News syndication services like Google News. One of the main area’s I looked at was images since then a few things have changed but the importance of good images and their uses have not.
What’s a logo image?
A logo image is the initial image in a post often it takes the form of a banner or image to determine category. It’s this image that is being picked up by Social Media sites for use, before going into specifics lets take a few examples; My Own Category Logos: 
Banners: 
ProBlogger Category 
Banner 
Original credit Xdjio DoshDosh Dosh Dosh site makes great use of Anime to create unique logo’s for each post 
Lorelle WordPress Tips Lorelle uses category images on nearly all her posts 
Logo Images and Social Media Sites?
Each site handles images slightly differently but lets look at the big two Digg and StumbleUpon; StumbleUpon StumbleUpon has now like Digg started using images on it’s pages, both in the review page and peoples favourites. Normally these pictures are screenshots of the page but sometimes they are pictures from the page cropped. 
As you can see Sebastian’s MSN crawler update bug has been cropped. 
In this case the surface area of 250x165px was used in reality it’s more likely to have been 250×166.666~ or a ratio of 3:2. The images when shown in favourites are 90×60. The ratio is determined on the width, so far I have seen 150, 175, 200, 250px as the base width. Digg Digg resizes images to 160×120 (4:3) or 160×160 (1:1) normally this is a straight resize but some images are showing sign of cropping.
Creating the Perfect sized image
So what would the perfect image for Social media look like size wise… 
I notice a problem, with perhaps the exception of problogger community banner I don’t think any of us are close! so this leads me to…
Throw out the rule book
Images are going to be more important a striking image can make the difference between sitting at the top and bottom of the social pile. But the thing about striking images is they tend to not follow ratio rules or ideas of “perfect images” so ultimately this was perhaps my longest and most pointless post, I hope you skipped to the end first.
6 comments
Very interesting logo i want to use them
Ah well Pervez you will just have to design your own, it goes without saying the images belong to the original owners and no you can’t use them on your own projects without seeking some sort of permission, nor would they make much sense to do so.
thank you for puting a nice information about logos and how to optimiz it for better views.
I just stumbled on this post, tim. I’d never really considered image size before, so it was interesting to hear your observations. Hope you don’t mind – but I went ahead and submitted your article to sphinn.
Great, practical tips. Sharing now
Maria Reyes-McDavis
Hi Tim, well I got here from http://www.timnash.co.uk which I posted on yesterday, great blog for those that have not been there yet. I think sizing and croping is relative to brand and website that it is going on to, but having them adds character.