When you’re working with most design tools to create marketing and product images, you’re typically going to be stuck with square and rectangle cropping options. These are easy for design tools to offer. And since plenty of images online use rectangular cropping and aspect ratios (including social media posts, many product images, and in-email pictures), many don’t think twice.
But what about when circle images and designs work best? There are plenty of occasions when this would be the case, including for some site avatars or profile pictures, favicons for your site, or even key design elements that you want to draw attention to.
The good news is that creating circle images and designs are easier than you’d think with the right tools! In this post, we’re going to show you how to make circle designs with Snappa, including how to crop an image into a circle, and go over some ideas for when you’d want to use them.
Why You’d Want to Use Circle Designs
Circle graphics can be useful whether you’re adding a circular element to an existing design because they add complexity to an image that can make it more aesthetically pleasing. You can see a great example of this here on one of our templates, where the combination of a contrasting color and a circular design within the square image is eye-catching:
You can see a great use of a circular cropped design on our site, where we use circular cropping for pictures in our testimonial section:
Another great example is your site’s brand logo or a favicon. The favicon is a small, 16×16 pixel image that will show up next to your website address, as you can see in the example below. It’s often your brand logo, and small, circular designs are most common.
How to Crop a Circle to Make a Circular Image
Ready to create a circular image? If you want to create a true circular image (instead of simply adding circular design elements to an existing image), go to Snappa and upload the desired image in the “Graphics” section. This can include photographs or other graphics and illustrations.
When you hover over the image, you’ll see the small cropping symbol appear. Click on it.
You’ll see the option to rotate the image, use a square crop, or to use a circular frame crop. Select the circle crop, and then stretch it to fit the image exactly how you want it.
Hit apply. You can then add any other touches to the image that you want, including adding text, design elements, or graphics if you choose. Once you’re happy with the image, go to “Download,” and then make sure you click “transparent background.” This is crucial, so that the image doesn’t download with white or black edges, and can be added as a true circle online. Then choose whether you want to download the image as a PNG or Retina PNG.
Your circle image is now ready to use, no additional cropping or editing needed!
4 Best Use Cases & Circle Design Ideas
Looking for new ways to incorporate circular designs onto your site to give it a fresh, modern look? Let’s take a look at 4 different ideas for circle design images for your business.
Brand Logos
Brand logos are a great use of circle designs, and it’s one of the most common reasons people start looking into how to make circle images to begin with. Rounded logos look sophisticated and professional, and they look great on everything from an official website to a business card.
When you’re creating a logo, always make sure to choose that transparent background so it works well on all different backgrounds.
Pictures of People on Your Site
We already showed you an example of using circle images to highlight testimonials on our site’s homepage, but we also use circular profile picture images for our team page, too.
Circular designs offer uniformity to the page, even though all the different images actually feature different backgrounds. It looks clean and professional.
Another option you can use if you want a clear background is to upload your image, and then click the “remove background” option while editing it. This will keep the subject of the image and remove everything else, giving you a clear white (and very consistent) background for the images.
Product or Service Thumbnails
Want to make your home page a little more visually appealing? Consider using circular thumbnails to showcase different products (or product categories, like in the example below).
You can use the same approach for services, too. Create circular icons to represent different services you offer. There are plenty of use cases for this idea.
You can also have circular icons on a landing page to offer an image that you can attack to key benefits or USPs of working with your business, for example, or to highlight top-selling products. Think about what information you want to draw the most attention to and go from there.
Create Branded Watermarks
Some brands add watermarks to their images for any number of reasons. Photographers might attach watermarks to images that customers haven’t purchased the rights to, for example, and some product pages feature watermarks, too. Circular watermarks are popular. They’re easy to place prominently on images.
With Snappa, you can create transparent text that’s perfect for a watermark and then crop it and resize it as needed.
Final Thoughts
There are plenty of reasons why businesses and designers are choosing to use more circular designs in their marketing and branded materials. It cleans clean, organized, and modern, and even a great site design can help you convince customers to choose you over your competition.
Fortunately, circle images are easier to create than many people think, as long as you’ve got the right tools.
You can start your free trial of Snappa here to start creating circle images today.
What do you think? Have you ever used circular cropping to create interesting images? What have you used circle images and designs for in your marketing? Share your thoughts, questions, and experience in the comments below!
