Does your logo work small?

A logo is usually designed on a screen at a comfortable size, where every line is clear and every color is distinct. Then it spends most of its working life at under 64 pixels.

At that size, thin strokes vanish into the background, gaps between letters fill in, and two colors of similar lightness merge into one shape. None of this is visible while you are designing, and all of it is visible to every visitor who sees your tab, your avatar or your app icon.

This tool renders your file at each of those sizes properly and puts them side by side at true scale. No zooming, because zooming is the thing that hides the problem.

Each size gets a number, and it is a real measurement rather than a score invented to look authoritative.

Your artwork is rendered once at a reference size to act as a yardstick. Each small version is then scaled back up to that same reference and compared against it, pixel for pixel, weighted by where the artwork actually is. The result is how much of the original structure survived the round trip.

Scaling back up is not an artificial step. It is close to what a browser does when it only has the small file and needs to draw it larger, and it exposes exactly the detail that was thrown away.

Plenty of excellent logos score poorly here, and that is not a contradiction. A wordmark with a tagline is built for a letterhead, a sign or a website header. It was never intended to be 16 pixels wide.

What the score tells you is that you need a second mark for small sizes, not that the first one is wrong. Almost every brand you can name has one, whether that is a single letter, a symbol, or one element lifted out of the full logo and drawn again with the small size in mind.

The mistake is not having a detailed logo. The mistake is shrinking it and hoping.

Nearly every platform crops a profile picture to a circle. Not a rounded square, a circle, which removes considerably more than people expect.

A square logo that fills its frame loses all four corners. A horizontal wordmark loses both ends. Turn the circle on and you see what the platform keeps rather than what you uploaded, which is the version everyone else will see.