Logos-Be careful what you ask for!
So you're starting a small business and you need a logo. You need to identify yourself. You need to set yourself apart in some way. YOU need an identity. O.K. YOU already have an identity. It's your name, but now your business needs an identity.
So you start searching for ideas, and if you don't have the time or don't feel comfortable developing it yourself, you search for someone to create your businesses new identity. In your search you discover that there are a lot of different views from different people on what you ought to have.
Invariably you will come across someone who says they can whip you up something in Photoshop and that you can have anything your heart desires. "100% guaranteed! We can do anything you ask for!"
Sounds perfect doesn't it. Tapping into your desire to have anything you can dream up is a sure way to get clients.
But just like the latest FAD DIET that promises you instant results while eating anything you crave, it lacks long term success. That glitzy multi-color logo will eventually add dollars to your bottom...line.
So what do you believe? The person that promises to deliver anything you want? Or the person who will realistically tell you what's possible, what will work, what will be the most cost effective, in other words...the unsugar-coated truth. Someone that will say "yes, it is possible to do that and no it's probably not the best idea." They aren't saying your creative vision isn't good, they are saying technically and financially there will be limitations down the road. That your 'anything you want' logo will cost more to print, will not be very versatile, will cause you a good deal of grief when all you wanted was some one-color tradeshow bags for the convention next month. (Yes, the full-color bags will be prohibitively expensive.)
So, the industry has some tried and true standards, which I'll get to in a minute.
Yes, technology is changing fast. Yes, we acknowledge that digital printing makes color printing more affordable for everyone and we certainly take advantage of that technology. But there are still a few areas that require a simple black and white rendition of your logo. And that's where the rubber meets the road as they say.
What might that be? Newspaper and yellow page ads come to mind first. Both mediums are printed on inexpensive (o.k. cheap) paper and on large presses called web presses. This is not an industry where on-demand digital printing can be used at the present time.They still print their publications 'the old-fashioned' way and because of the volume and the money invested in the equipment, it isn't likely to change in the next couple of years. Yes, I know we have the internet now and people thought by now that books would be obsolete. But they aren't. To my knowledge, Borders and Barnes & Nobles haven't closed their door just yet. Last I looked there were still lots and lots of books being printed 'the old-fashioned way'. But I digress.
Now before you emphatically say, that you don't plan to place an ad in the newspaper or the yellow pages, let me suggest that you may at some point co-sponsor an event. Great media coverage and PR. Your logo will appear on the t-shirt and in the newspaper as part of the pre and post promotion with many other sponsors logos. Stop reading this for a moment and go get your newspaper.Yes, I'll wait. More than likely there is an event going on right now where you will find a whole host of companies that are sponsoring it. Now, take a careful look at the logos. By necessity they are small because there are 20 or 30 to be shoehorned into the ad. How many can you read? You may know some of them just by their distinctive shape even if you can't read the fine type, but some are just a fuzzy blur. The ad I'm looking at has a gray swirley background behind the logos making it even more difficult to identify who the logos belong to. That must have been a 'looked good on screen' moment. I'm betting it was in color and looked absolutely stunning. But then the rubber met the road and it was printed in gray and black and well, not too much white. Those logos that faired well are inherently simple and black. Just black. Those that didn't fair so well are considerably more complicated. I can tell someone sent them in color and now they are gray. Since the background is gray and the logo is gray, they kind of melt into the background.
So now I'm getting to the part where I explain why most professional graphic designers create (or re-create) their ideas with what they call the vector format and those files are not created in Photoshop. If they sketch the logo by hand they will then re-create it in a draw program so they can provide you files that will be easier to resize and recolor ultimately costing less money to reproduce.
The vector format will allow the image to be made physically, bigger or smaller and the edges will still be smooth. That means less expense down the road. If it is well designed you can put it on a billboard really big or the side of a pen really small. That's what I call versatile.
Done right you can use the logo by itself or you can layer it over a photo if you want to but you aren't locked into one look forever. You, (if you have the right graphics software), another graphic designer or any reputable printer can easily change the color if you decide periwinkle blue may not have been a good choice for your auto shop. Although it would probably be distinctive among other auto shops in the color choice alone. But that's probably another story.
Getting back to your logo, you can use a well designed vector format logo for all the things you may need over the entire life of your business in a financially feasible way. If you want the color changed six months or a year from now, it will be easier therefore less expensive than if you only have in a raster format. (raster formats are: .gif, .jpeg, .png, .tiff, .bmp, .psd (Photoshop native files),.psp (PaintShopPro native files) and a few others.
While some people equate 'vector' with clipart or plain or boring or corporate it isn't the format that defines it's style. Part of what defines style is the typeface selected. And then the service mark or graphic supplements or supports the typography. Sure, sometimes it works the other way around or sometimes the mark itself is so distinctive that you know in an instant what brand it is even without seeing the name.
Clipart can be either a vector drawing or it can be a pixel-based piece of artwork.
Clipart is defined as a piece of art that has already been drawn or created to be used by many people. It is sold over and over again. Or often it is included on CD's or distributed with software.
Originally, it was literally clipped or cut out of a book and pasted onto a page by a person doing paste-up by hand in a print shop. However, something that has been created especially for a logo is not clipart. It is an original piece of work created specifically so your customers can easily identify your business.
Depending on the design it can be elegant, simple, sophisticated, whimsical, or old-fashioned. It can be one color or many colors (if your budget is big enough). You can use it for your business card, your stationery, your vehicle wrap, your billboard, your 2,000 tradeshow bags, your foil embossed folders, your t-shirts, your promotional items, your black & white newspaper ad, your black & yellow, yellow page ad (because four color ads costs a whole lot more)...you name it and it can be repurposed for any conceivable use.
You want to glitz it up for your website, or signage, or packaging? You can do that. But it doesn't work the other way.
If you just get a multicolored 'logo' in what we call a raster format (that's a lot of little pixels or dots on your screen in a physically defined area) you're pretty much stuck with it. Six months down the road when you have re-thought the whole direction of your business and decided periwinkle blue wasn't such a great idea and green is the way to go...ah...well it's going to be a lot more difficult to change it and that means it will cost more. (Remember the adding dollars to your bottom line at the beginning of this article?) This happens quite often when your logo is integrated with a background like a photo on a website.
Here, let me show you some examples.
This is a fictitious small enterprise just starting out. Here's a logo I have created for it. It's all vector but it's not clipart because I created it from scratch.
My fictitious client had indicated that they wanted:
- a little on the rustic side
- incorporate the 'idea' of 'oatmeal' and 'mill' without actually showing a picture of a mill
- favorite color is orange
- could be made into a stamp for imprinting their soap
- could be used on their future website
- not too big for the business card, labels and packaging
- big enough for a banner for tradeshows, but small enough to fit on the bags
- something they could use on their home computer now because they are just starting out and something that would look good in black because the color ink for their printer was kind of pricey
- could be sent to an outside printer, magazine and newspaper
Now as a good graphic designer I am going to provide my fictional client with the original 2 color version in several formats and I am going to provide it in black and white in several formats to accomodate the above laundry list of needs and desires. Below, I am showing it as it might go to the local newspaper, the yellow pages, a magazine for a black & white ad or a screen-printer for t-shirts for an event that they are one of the sponsors, and they have been asked to provide their logo in black and white (no gray, just black and white).
Now let's say this was your logo and created in a pixel-based program from the start. Because you envisioned it on your soon to be website, you wanted it incorporated into a photo of the view from 'The Wickem Mill' to give your website a more personal feel. You wanted your web visitors to make a more emotional connection to 'Wickem Mill' and this early morning mist rising off the meadow photo is perfect. To make it more readable on the darker background you decided you wanted the informative tagline 'handcrafted oatmeal soap' white. After all people are going to have to know right away what you are selling.
If the original logo (the mark and company name) has been created as a vector file, it would be a very straightforward procedure to change the color of the tagline and the outside edges of the graphic to accomodate the new darker background on top and the white background on the bottom. A medium gray will do the trick.
If the logo had been done originally in a pixel-based program (ie: Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Corel Photo Paint for example) with the photograph in the background as a one layer graphic it would have taken more time and effort to change it and that always means it costs more.
Let's say you had originally requested a different background. Perhaps the side of the old mill to give it a much more rustic feel. You love the look and want to use it for your business cards and packaging and ads.
And in an effort to give you exactly what you ask for, the person doing it for you (not me...I know better than to do something that won't work well) provides it because after all you're paying for it.
Now, let's say you want to run an ad in the local paper and to keep the cost down you want it black and white. No gray, just black and white, so you provide them with the full-color graphic with your logo on it, but when it's changed to just black and white, we see where it loses a lot in the translation. The tagline 'handcrafted oatmeal soap' kind of disappears so the reader no longer knows what your product is.The name of your company isn't very readable either. Rustic has taken on a whole new meaning.
The moral of the story is, be careful what you ask for because someone who may not have your best interest at heart may just give it to you.
A good graphic designer considers your future, not just the present. Not just what you want today, but what you will 'need' next year or the year after or six years from now. Putting your best interests first may mean that we have to explain why something might not work as well as you or I want or need it to. It's part of our job just as it's the auto mechanics job to tell you that the glitzy hub-caps are not going to make your car stop on a dime. Sure they'll look great, but your front bumper won't when you rear-end the car in front of you.
