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Making Best Use of your Logo

A logo is an essential part of any organisation's identity. It will appear on their stationery, vehicles, premises and nowadays their website and emails. Get the logo right and you will establish brand loyalty and increae sales.

Logo Rules

Clipart

Never ever use clipart. Apart from the fact that it looks naff, you are unlikely to be given permission to use it copmmercially.

Special Effects

Do not introduce a special effect that you cannot recreate on a letterhead, t-shirt, van panel and so on. Drop shadows, reflections, lighting effects and so on can look great on a webpage but are almost impossible to recreate on hardcopy documents unless you are prepared to shell out for high quality prints every time.

Colours

Light colours, shadows and gradients do not fax or copy well. Make sure you you have a solid colour and black and white version of your logo.

The best results come from logos built from Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYB) as they are much cheaper to reproduce.

Monograms

Established brands can get away monogams. Most people will recognise the monograms Tesco, BA or M&S without the need to describe the company but for new businesses a logo with the full name is often required. Mine uses the monogram 'EWD' but includes the words 'Effective Web Design'. Maybe one day when I'm rich and famous I can drop the descrptor but for now it is essential to describe what I do.

Complex Logos

The more complex the logo the more difficult it is to reproduce at different scales. A 12ft banner may look great but how will look as a 200px image on a website? A simple logo is easier to reproduce and much easier to resize without loss of detail.

Vector Formats

Make sure the logo is sizeable. This is easily acheived using vector formats (wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics). The advantage that these have over bitmaps is that you can increase or decrease the image size with no loss of details. Once you have an image the size you want by all means save as a jpg or gif but the oringinal should remain as a vector graphic. If you start with a jpg or gif then as soon as increase the image size (for use on a poster for example), you will start to see pixelation.

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