Emphasize a portion of an image, object, or composition by enlarging and reframing.

Cropping (or reframing) is an essential design skill and a powerful design trick. It can be a complex and chaotic world, and choices need to be made about what will be seen and what won’t—what should be emphasized and what shouldn’t—who makes it into the frame and who doesn’t. Cropping is editing. And editing makes communication clearer by reinforcing the basic message and minimizing the extraneous.

Use cropping to draw attention to a specific part of a photo, illustration, or composition—zeroing in on whatever best communicates your message. Extreme cropping can reveal the resolution of an image (pixels, film grain, tool marks, etc.), further accentuating the effect.

In this promotion for Restaurant Florent, M&Co uses cropping to focus attention on the mouth of a typical New Yorker. The crop is tight enough to reveal the film grain.

And the reason for the tight crop? The talker has the day’s menu is writ small all over his open mouth.

Cropping can also be a storytelling device (for an entertaining and informative explanation of cropping/framing as a narrative device, see Scott McCloud’s excellent book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art). By using the frame edge to eliminate a portion of the image the subject can be made to come (arrive/enter) or go (exit/escape), rise (elevate/levitate) or fall (descend/drop).

For this 2wice cover design, Abbott Miller has used an unconventional crop to indicate both the motion of dance and the wildness of “Animal”.

Cropping can abstract an image. On the cover of McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Chip Kidd achieves artistry (where obviousness was a clear danger) with a smart crop of the horse.

Reduce an object in all dimensions.

Making an object smaller implies cuteness, vulnerability, weakness, insignificance, and/or isolation. As with enlargement, the bigger the scale shift, the bigger the drama. I immediately think of a miniaturized Statue of Liberty or a tiny Eiffel Tower—souvenirs that allow us to own and transport massive, iconic structures. And then there’s the comedy version of this trick: Man gets into cab and barks to the hack, “take me to the Empire State Building, and step on it!”

At a time when most cars (and cabs) in America were hulking machines, and auto advertisements featured large, full-color photos and illustrations of the latest models, the advertising firm of Doyle Dane Bernbach thwarted expectation. By dramatically reducing the image of the Volkswagen in their famous “Think small” ad, they made the car look cute and non-threatening, but also singular and independent. The text of the ad further shaped the message—extolling the virtues of a small car while singing the praises of Volkswagen’s remarkable reliability.

Volkswagen “Think Small” advertisement. Doyle Dane Bernbach, 1959.

Increase the size of an object.

Take something small and making it bigger is a fundamental design trick. It’s most effective when the elargement defies or exceeds the viewer’s expectations. An object that appears 100 times normal size is much more dramatic than one that’s just a little bit bigger than normal. Because it’s so fundamental to design, it appears countless times throughout design history. Here are a few choice examples.

Robert Hooke (1635–1703) was an early master of enlargment. His book Micrographia, published in 1665, contains exquisite engravings made after observations through a microscope. My favorite is the flea, which not only fills the page, but is large enough to require a fold out.

Engraving of a flea from Micrographia. Robert Hooke, 1665. (from The Visual Telling of Stories)

Here’s a more contemporary example: a street number for 9 West 57th Street in Manhattan.It’s large, it’s red, and it sits in the middle of the sidewalk. Created by Chermayeff & Geismar in 1972, it still manages to surprise and entertain more than three decades later.

9 West 57th Street. Chermayeff & Geismar, 1972.