 So you need a company logo - where next?Published Date: 2003-11-23 04:43:03 WorkOnInternet.com
The first step in your quest to create a brand for your company is obtain a logo, it needs to present some sort of feel, message or impact that relays to the customer what you as a business are all about - then it's your responsibility to ensure that you uphold that brand, establishing and cementing it over time. Finding and instructing a suitable logo designer sounds a simple enough task, and it is, as long as you are armed with the knowledge of what it is you need from a designer, there are many practical points to consider that have nothing to do with how innovative your logo is: "I like pale blue and I also like red" Your designer has presented you with your logo via email and you love it, you love the look of it, and the colour too, all you need to do now is send it to the commercial printers and it'll print out the same, wrong. Computer monitors do not provide a true representation of colour, and what you see on your screen it not necessarily the same colour that will print out, or even the same colour that other people can see on their own monitors. "So How Do I Get The Colour I Want?" When you take your logo to a commercial printer you will be given a choice of two printing methods: Process Colour Printing Colour is produced on your choice of printed material (paper, vinyl, cardboard, fabric and so on) by mixing four separate ink colours: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK). Using this method can mean that when printing many copies of the same artwork, as is common with business cards and other forms of stationary, some areas of colour may not appear completely consistent, consistency is affected by ink density, temperature, paper quality, and when using CMYK the colour can differ between printing companies. Spot Colour Printing If you wish to ensure that your logo colour will print exactly the same on every single printed copy, you can specify what is called a 'spot colour', they are also guaranteed to look the same no matter which firm prints them. There are a few spot colour systems available, but the industry standard is the Pantone Matching System, each Pantone colour has a code - for example PANTONE DS 221 - 8U is a pale blue colour; colours can be selected from swatch books that display these colours and list the codes for each one, then these colours can be applied to your logo by your designer. Remember that when looking at a Pantone colour on a computer monitor it can look different from when printed, only by viewing a 'swatch book' can you see the actual colour as it will print. "My designer gave me my logo and it looks great on my website, but when I try to print it, it looks blurry, what's going on?" There are a multitude of different file types available for your logo, and a professional designer should be able to provide them all if requested, it doesn't cost your designer any more to provide more than one file type, the same way it doesn't cost your designer any more to provide a logo made up of many different colours rather than just one or two. There is a minimum of three file types that you should ask for: Gifs Gifs are usually featured on web sites, cannot be resized in any way, and must be used in their original size. Tiffs This is a file format suitable for importing your logo into word-processing software. A .tiff can be resized smaller in your word processing software without distortion, so it is advisable to ask your designer to supply you with quite a large .tiff image. Eps An .eps file is a 'Vector' image, a Vector image is very simply an image that can be scaled to literally any size without distortion or loss of quality, it also is the file type that you would give to your commercial printer to work from. It would be prudent to select a designer offering free lifetime support so that you will always have access to any size .gif you require, or extra file types. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright Truly Ace 2003 http://www.trulyace.com Creative unique logo design, web design & commercial illustration.
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