Case Study

Making a mark work at 32 pixels.

The Montague Company had a logo built for spec sheets and trade show banners: tall, detailed, and dependent on nine characters of legible type. It fell apart the moment it had to live as a circle the size of a thumbnail.

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Client

The Montague Company

Role

Art Direction, Brand Design

Deliverable

Avatar / Profile Mark

Use Case

Social, App Icons, Internal Tools

01 / The Problem

The logo only worked at one size.

The primary Montague logo was a wordmark plus a tall vertical device, fine on a letterhead but unreadable once it got cropped into a circle for a LinkedIn photo, a Slack avatar, or a favicon. Every platform that asked for a square or round profile image forced an awkward crop that either cut off the mark entirely or squeezed it into a smear of color nobody could parse at a glance.

There was no fallback mark. No icon-only version. Every time someone needed an avatar, they either used a screenshot of the full logo, badly cropped, or left the profile picture blank.

Original Montague logo lockup Original Lockup
Result of a Direct Crop
02 / The Process

Isolating a mark that could carry the brand alone.

Rather than shrinking the existing lockup, the approach was to find the single element inside the identity that could stand on its own, then rebuild it so it held up at the smallest sizes it would ever be seen at, not the largest.

01

Isolate the mark

Pulled the icon element out of the full lockup and tested it alone, without the wordmark propping it up, to see if it had enough identity to work independently.

02

Simplify the geometry

Reduced fine detail and thin strokes that would disappear at small sizes. Widened counters and increased stroke weight so the shape would hold its form when scaled down to 16–32px.

03

Design for the crop, not the canvas

Built the mark inside a square canvas with generous padding on all sides, so it could be safely cropped to a circle by any platform without clipping the edges of the shape.

04

Test at real sizes

Instead of judging the mark at full resolution, tested it the way it would actually be seen: as a 32px avatar next to a name, as a 16px favicon in a browser tab.

Legibility Across Real-World Sizes
16px · Favicon
32px · Slack
48px · Email
96px · LinkedIn
160px · Profile
03 / Before & After

From unreadable crop to a mark that reads instantly.

Before
After
04 / Where It Lives Now

One mark, everywhere a full logo can't go.

01

Social profile photos

02

Slack & internal tools

03

Email sender avatar

04

Browser favicon

Outcome

The brand finally had a mark built for the places a full logo was never going to fit: small, round, and fast to recognize. What used to be a blank profile picture or a bad crop is now a consistent, legible presence anywhere the company shows up as an avatar rather than a logo.