What is the best ratio for graphic design?

This post is the result of a Twitter poll on the @designspiration community and the overwhelming majority voted for a ratio of 1:1.

I love that ratio as it creates an abundance of opportunities for collaboration and flexibility. In my own work I've been experimenting with ratios to get to know different sizes of images. I've learnt a lot about composition, balance, composition of negative space and the role of type on images.

If you're keen to experiment with ratios for yourself you can download my set of Photoshop PSD files to get started. I think you'll find them helpful if you're planning to change the ratio on your own website.

The ratio 1:1 works for a wide variety of images. It's particularly useful when designing web pages and I've even been doing it for print projects.

There are lots of ways to change the ratio for any image. You can scale it up or down, use a large or small version of the image and change the orientation (landscape or portrait) of the image.

You can also alter the size of the image, change the width of the main subject and add an additional element (such as a quote or logo) in the middle to create more visual interest. In this post I'm going to show you how I changed the ratio of my website header image and explain why I chose to do it. The original ratio was 800px x 468px. You'll also see a few other examples and you can download the files so you can experiment for yourself. You can edit the ratio by changing the width and height properties of the image. These properties define the ratio.

The height defines the aspect ratio of the image, the width is the size of the image when it's displayed at 100% (width:height). These settings will help you to create an attractive website. You don't want to overuse high resolution images and it's best not to use huge images as they take up too much space on a page.

Creating the new ratio. I decided to use a 1200px by 675px image as I wanted to experiment with a large image in a horizontal position.