so you need a company logo?

You've completed your business plan, the web site's nearly finished, and you're raring to go, but something seems strangely missing, your website is nice enough and so is your stationary but they just don't have that "look at me, remember me" factor, that missing element is called a 'brand'.

A brand isn't just a company logo, a brand is the combined set of impressions that a customer gains as a result of their interactions with your company, and its products and services, in fact everything you say and do establishes your brand identity.

The first step in your quest to create a brand identity for your company is to commission a company logo design - this should be developed by a professional logo designer if you want it to play an effective role in your marketing. It needs to represent the business well and it's ethos (brand), and do so in a way this is ideally very different to your competitors. It is then your responsibility to ensure that you uphold that brand, establishing and cementing it over time.

Once your company logo designer begins to present you with design concepts, it's important to consider a couple of practicalities before making a choice, and to understand how to get the best out of your logo design in terms of print quality.

"I like pale blue and I also like red"

Your designer has presented you with your company 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 print colour, and what you view on your screen will not necessarily be the colour of the printed version of the logo design. Or indeed 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 company 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:

Low resolution Jpegs
Low resolution jpegs are those which are set at 72dpi (dots per inch). They should only be used on web sites, cannot be resized in any way, and must be used in their original size.

High resolution Jpegs
High resolution jpegs are those which are set at 300dpi (dots per inch). This is a resolution suitable for high quality professional printing, but do take care that your jpeg is 'large enough' for the print project at hand before you use it. Your designer can advise.

This is also 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 should give to your commercial printer to work from.

Indeed this file type is preferred by any printing firm or professional designer to work from due to the fact it can be manipulated and is transparent on any background. It is better to hand a designer or printing firm a vector EPS over and above a high resolution Jpeg file for these reasons.

Other similar file types, which are also vector include .ai (Adobe Illustrator) and .pdf (if exported by vector creation software such as Adobe Illustrator.)