What a postage stamp should look like

I spend a lot of time during the design critique talking about photos and how they should be cropped. The Orion uses postage-stamp-sized images on the page A2 teasers to Web stories and the entertainment calendar, and theorion.com uses these same small images on its home page to illustrate single stories.

Often, the photo chosen is an overall shot of a scene or a photo of a group of people. That's a bad idea. Photos that small are unreadable. Detail shots and tight crops are a better choice.

While I was reading a story on Salon this morning, I noticed the teases to Web stories elsewhere and thought, "THAT'S what postage stamps should look like."

Here they are: