a printer s guide to logo design
1.Where to Start A great logo should identify your organisation, help define your culture or ethos, promote your brand and develop loyalty from your customers. There are lots of free guides, design tools and agencies out there to help you design your perfect logo but making it work for you is where you can reap the rewards of building brand recognition and loyalty. Putting your logo to work on your products, website, business stationery, uniforms, name badges, signage and promotional items is essential and this can sometimes be an afterthought. As a result you may find it more expensive that you thought to purchase promotional materials, or simply find that they don t have the same impact that you had expected. As a printer and supplier of name badges, promotional items and branded clothing we will be highlighting some aspects you should consider when designing your logo to ensure it works uniformly across a wide range of media and promotional materials. Many of the tips here can also help you save money and time when it comes to purchasing branded materials and ensure your logo is prominent, clear and effective. Let s begin! 2
2.Colours: Spot vs Process Applying colour to your logo/brand can be tricky, but as a general rule of thumb it is wise to start designing your logo in black and white and apply colour at a later stage. Your choice of colours should filter throughout the look and feel of all of your organisation s documents, literature and beyond, so it s an important aspect to consider carefully. You should also be aware of the print costs you will encounter when it comes to purchasing branded materials, normally determined by the type of colour used in your logo. There are generally two types of colours to choose from, spot colours and process colours. Spot colours are solid blocks of colour with no tints, shades or fading, as pictured below. Process colours can include all of the aforementioned features, or fading from one colour to another. 3
Traditional printing methods, for anything from stationery to workwear, used spot colours with the print costs determined by the number of colours used in your design. Nowadays, digital print is available on most materials, with the number of colours used being unaffective to the cost of print. However, the cost of digital print can be a lot more than spot colour printing and often restricts the range of products available to you. We would suggest creating your logo using spot colours or at least having a version of your logo that uses spot colours, as well as a black and white version. These versions can then be printed using spot colours or digitally leaving you with a much greater range of promotional items, clothing, signage and the like it to choose from. Certainly across our range of products, we still find that we can offer the lowest prices and best range of items printed in a single colour. 4
www.melubabadges.com 3.Colours: Pantones So you have picked one or more colours for your logo and are ready to go. How can you make sure that the business cards you need are printed in the correct colour? Will they be the same shade as the posters and name badges you ve purchased? You may have a CMYK reference for your single colour logo but that reference can produce vastly different shades depending on the printer being used and the material your logo is being printed to. The Pantone Matching System [PMS] is the internationally recognised solution to reproducing standardised spot colours. Different printers and manufacturers can all refer to a Pantone Book to match the shade of a colour against their materials and print. Creating your logo using pantone colours is essential if you want uniformity across supplies coming from different manufacturers or printers. These Pantone colour mugs show how the Pantone Matching System defines its standard colours. image credit: Garrett Coakley https://www.flickr.com/photos/garrettc/1673105395 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ 5
4.Proportion What do we mean by a logo s proportion? In this case the proportion of a logo refers to its length in reference to its height; it could be square, portrait or landscape. Why should this matter? Well if you think about where we typically see logos, the proportion of your logo can make a huge difference to the impact it has when seen on signage, clothing, promotional items and more. Consider a shop front with a large landscape space for signage above a window and door. How would your logo look in such a space if it were square or portrait? Equally how would such a logo look if you wanted to order some promotional pens with your logo printed to the barrel? See how a square logo is confined to the width of the barrel: There are a number of solutions and methods you can employ when designing your logo to make if suitable for a variety of spaces. If you opt for a square or portrait logo, can elements such as the brand name or tag line be separated to create a landscape version? The same is true in reverse, if you have a landscape logo but have a square area to fill. When designing, consider what would your logo look like fit to various realistic spaces, and whether your logo can be adapted to fit different proportions. 6
5.Fonts & Typeface More often than not, the best and most recognisable logos are very simple, clean and based around a font that expresses the culture or identity of your brand. See how these big brands logos reflect their sophistication (Apple), strength (Gilette) or agility (Nike). Websites such as 1001fonts.com allow you to preview your text in a number of fonts before you download the one you want, and is a great starting point for designing your logo. The font you choose should embody the character of your organisation and be appropriate to the marketplace in which you operate. Why not customise your selected font by extending portions or elements of the letters making up your logo to make it truly unique? Regardless of the font you select you should keep in mind that many users outside of your organisation may not have this font already. Therefore, the file format you save your logo in, and where and when you use it are important. Often brands have a family of 2 or 3 fonts. Typically one font would be used on internal or branded documents, with the font embedded to the document to maintain its style when viewed by external users. Another popular font is selected for use on emails and editable documents that your customers and suppliers can see and use. Keep reading for our section on File Formats for information on how to save and maintain the fonts used to make your logo. 7
6.Brand Guidelines Larger organisations who invest heavily in their brand often have brand guidelines or a brand book that usually details the following information as a minimum: Brand Essence: definition of an organisations brand values, promise or message. Logo & Tagline: the various approved versions of the logo. Colour Palette: the specific Pantone colours to be used including conversions to CMYK, RGB & HEX Codes. Typography: the specific fonts to be used in branded communications including font sizes etc. Positioning, Size & Clear Space: how to position the logo on various items including minimum size and white space around the logo. Application Examples: the logo shown on a variety of products/materials and examples of how not to use the logo. Check out this example of the UNICEF brand book. Depending on the size of your organisation and the number of people responsible for purchasing printed items, a brand book might be overkill. However, a shortened single page version that you can easily refer to will always be useful to you and your print suppliers, helping to avoid errors and ensure consistency. We would recommend the following as essential: Logo Versions; Pantone Colours [primary and secondary] & Fonts. 8
7.File Formats Once you or a designer has created your logo it is best that you have the various versions of your logo saved in two specific file formats. You will be asked for one or both of these by print suppliers depending on what your logo is being applied to. The first file format you will need is a Vector Based file set to outlines. This is a version of your logo made up of points and curves or vectors. This allows designers to increase or reduce the physical size of your logo without losing the quality and clarity of the logo. It also allows designers to amend the colours within your logo so that they can pantone match designs. Vector files are typically used for spot colour printing and offer the truest representation of your logo. Vector files usually come in one of the following formats:.eps [encapsulated postscript];.ai [adobe illustrator] or.cdr [corel draw]. The second file format you should request your logo in is a Pixel or Bitmap Based File. This version of your logo can be easily used by non-designers, for your website and digital media. Such files are made up of varying coloured pixels that when viewed together from a distance form your logo. As increasing or decreasing the physical size of the file can cause distortion or pixilation [blurring], it is important that the file is set-up specifically for the intended use. A bitmap has a resolution setting called dpi [dots per inch]. Typically digital media requires a 72dpi file whilst for print it should be 300dpi or more. You can also set up the logo size [pixel height or width] specific to your intended use. Bitmap files will normally require a full colour process print and usually come in one of the following formats:.gif;.jpeg;.tif;.png or.ps [adobe photoshop]. It is best to talk to your printer or designer who should be able to tell you the best settings for your bitmap logo. 9
8. Conclusion There is a lot to consider when designing your logo, and here we have only included the factors that are useful when it comes to displaying and using your logo on printed materials. By keeping these points in mind, you should have the necessary tools to supply the correct files to a range of different print suppliers. This will ensure that they have the necessary tools and information to produce your logo consistently across a wide range of materials and products. This is key to promoting and building an effective brand that generates familiarity, loyalty, sets you apart from your competitors and engages your customers. 10
About Us At meluba we love to help organisations, people and brands promote themselves supplying everything from name badges to promotional items, printed clothing and workwear. Check out our badge website, www.melubabadges.com, to find out more about our range of products and services. Call us on 01536 483 556, send an email to info@meluba.com, or get in touch by clicking the button below: get in touch 11