Replace guesswork with solid strategy...
Archive for the ‘Logo Design Ideas’ Category
All About Visual Vocabulary and how it can help your small business
Saturday, August 7, 2010
by Erin Ferree
Source: elf design
Your Visual Vocabulary is an essential tool in your business’s brand identity toolkit. It is made up of all of the graphics that supplement your logo, forming the graphic “face” of your business and anchoring your brand identity.
Think of your logo as the “superhero” of your brand, and the Visual Vocabulary elements as its “sidekicks”; in many design applications and finished materials, your logo won’t appear by itself. It will have the help of all of these Visual Vocabulary elements to accomplish its job of communicating and connecting with your target market.
Your Visual Vocabulary can include design elements such as:
- Font styles: You should have a small collection of typefaces, font weights, and styles that you use regularly in your materials. Consider fonts for both print and web use, and specify styles for headlines, subheads, and body copy in each case, at minimum. For each style, you should specify the font to use, the color it should be, and its paragraph alignment: whether it should be centered, left-aligned, or justified (where the text lines up with both sides of the column). You can read more about fonts in my article “Font Basics for Branding Your Small Business.”
- Colors: Creating a color palette for your business can add flexibility to your materials and give you an easy resource to go to when choosing colors for illustrations, graphics, or any other part of your Visual Vocabulary. If you keep your colors consistent and limited, then you’ll develop a more focused palette that will be easier for your audience to associate with your business.
- Shapes: The shape that you use for your bullets, callout boxes, color-blocked areas, and even borders in your materials can create a strong visual component that will contribute to your memorability.
- Layout: The layout of a piece is how the different elements are laid out on the page. This covers elements like the number of columns and the placement of all of the other Visual Vocabulary elements.
- Backgrounds: Using background screens or shapes, or even a specially designed watermark, can give your materials an extra bit of flair. You can also develop a special background that will make your materials stand out.
- Photographs: Photos can add a lot of personality to your materials and really help you to make a connection with your target audience. You can purchase stock photography inexpensively these days; buy a few shots that are compelling and really match the rest of your Visual Vocabulary. Make sure that you buy the highest resolution and largest size that you’ll need for materials down the road.
- Special textual treatments: For very special text that you want to highlight, such as your tagline, marketing bullets, sidebars, or bullets that detail your specialties, consider specifying a special face, size, and color to use in all of your materials.
- Paper type: Printing your materials on a special type of paper can make them look even more interesting. Papers come in different colors, textures, and thicknesses that can contribute to your material’s uniqueness.
To create a Visual Vocabulary for your business, you should create a set of specifications for the types of design elements you will use in all of your marketing materials. Once you have laid out the set of “rules” for your Visual Vocabulary, use the same elements consistently throughout your materials. When trends change, or when your business grows or your materials become stale, you can simply change some or all of these elements to create a new, fresh look.
Specifying the qualities of these design elements and using them consistently throughout your marketing materials will have many benefits, including:
- Increasing your brand’s memorability: A Visual Vocabulary gives your marketing materials more designed visuals. Adding more visuals makes your materials, and your company, more memorable.
- Making your brand designs more flexible: A Visual Vocabulary can provide you with a set of visuals that are more loosely tied to your business than your logo, which means that you can exchange and recombine those visuals for different campaigns, service offerings, or products. You can also redesign your Visual Vocabulary elements during the lifecycle of your business, updating and refreshing your materials as necessary, while still backing them with a solid logo and brand identity base.
- Adding to the consistency of your marketing materials: When you use your Visual Vocabulary across all of your marketing materials, the repeated elements add to your visual consistency.
- Making your business’s materials stand out from the competition: Your Visual Vocabulary can add a lot of personality to your materials, differentiating them from your competition’s marketing pieces. It can also add visual information to your materials, to help tell your business’s story.
- Making a small business look larger: By expanding your brand design with more surrounding graphics, you’ll expand your designs and make your small business look like a bigger business.
A Visual Vocabulary provides a powerful key to your target market, helping it to better understand your business: what you offer and how you work. It also contributes to your business’s memorability.
About the Author
Erin Ferree, founder of elf design, helps small businesses stand out from their competition so that they can connect with their best customers. She does this by working with business owners to define their brands, and then using that definition to create logos, marketing materials and websites that show how they shine.
She also believes that all of a business’s brand materials should be not just pretty, but also designed effectively and strategically. This produces a winning combination of materials that communicate visually, look stunning and are designed effectively, which help her clients reach their target audiences.
She writes about design, branding and marketing through her eBooks, her blog at www.not-just-pretty.com, and in free articles in her newsletter, “Stand Out”, which you can subscribe to at http://www.elf-design.com/newsletter.html.
0
Logo Files: Versions of your logo that you should own
Friday, August 6, 2010
by Erin Ferree
Source: elf design
Your logo is the most important graphic element in which you will invest for your business. You should own the logo in many file formats. Having a library of logo files will enable you to send vendors the types of files they need (for example, other designers, printers, or other service providers).
There are two major categories that I will cover in this article—color variations and file-type variations.
Color Variations
You should receive your logo graphic from your designer in all of the file types listed below in the “File Formats” section (unless otherwise noted) in the following color variations:
Pantone color or CMYK color
Pantone color —
If you intend to have your business cards or other materials printed on a press, choosing Pantone colors makes the process less expensive than printing in full four- (or CMYK-) color. Of course, if you choose to print your materials digitally, then this is not an issue.
Full CMYK color —
This is for four-color printing, full color ads, and for use on any materials that you intend to print from your own desktop color printer, i.e, invoices, statements, receipts, letters, etc.
RGB color —
For use on your website or in your email. You should get JPEG and GIF formats in this color scheme.
Grayscale —
If your logo contains more than one color, or if it has tones or shades of one color, you should receive a grayscale version. You would use this when your logo is included in the newspaper or in the Yellow Pages, or on any black and white laser-printed materials you may create.
Black and white —
This version would be used to produce the best-quality logo on faxes or any materials you reproduce using a copier.
Depending on the design of the logo, sometimes only either a black and white or grayscale version of the logo will be applicable. For example, for a logo with just one color in it, only a black and white version would apply. And, if elements of different colors overlap, a grayscale version will ensure that the different graphic elements do not bleed together, as they would if they were all converted to black. So you may not receive both grayscale and black and white versions, but having one or the other should suffice. File Formats:
Original graphic — The original Illustrator, Photoshop, or other program-native document. This comes in handy if you make a minor change to your company (i.e., if you add LLC or Inc.), or if you decide to change your color scheme.
To make these types of changes easiest, you need a file of the logo in the original program in which it was created. If the logo was created in Illustrator (which is preferable, because creating vector graphics in Illustrator will allow your logo to be scaled up and down as needed), the type should not be outlined, unless your designer has done so in order to modify the typeface.
If the logo was created in Photoshop, the layers of the document should not be flattened, and the type should not be rasterized (converted from editable type into pixels)—this will ensure that it will still be editable.
Ask your designer which fonts have been used in the logo, so you could purchase it for use in other materials. This will avoid the lengthy and time-consuming process of font matching, should you work with other designers.
You should receive several different versions of the software’s native file formats from the designer, in case a future designer or printer ever uses an older version of the software. For example, I provide Illustrator files in Illustrator CS3 along with Illustrator CS1.
EPS format — I recommend that your logo be in EPS 10 format. EPS can be opened and processed by many different programs. This is also the file format most commonly accepted/requested by printers.
PDF format — You will not be able to view many of the file formats of your design that you receive unless you have graphics software applications. I suggest that you receive the PDF files of each Color Version of your logo. You will be able to view the PDF files using Adobe Acrobat Reader, available for free on Adobe’s web site at www.adobe.com.
“Outlined” original format — The difference between this graphic and the original would be found in the Illustrator files. The fonts in the outlined original format would be outlined, which means that the letters are converted into shapes. In Photoshop, the type should be rasterized and the layers should be flattened. This outlined file should be provided in all of the formats listed above—original program format, EPS, and PDF.
These outlined file versions should be provided to any printers or service bureaus to lessen the chance that the elements in your logo could inadvertently be shifted around. This will make sure that your logo will print with the right font should the printer not have the font used in your logo.
JPEG and GIF formats — For web or email use. The GIF graphic should be created with a transparent background.
TIF format at 300 dots per inch (DPI) resolution, in RGB color format — For use in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint files.
TIF format at 300 DPI — Some printers, ad vendors (i.e., the Yellow Pages), or other designers may require this file format in order to create additional designed materials.
Having your logo in these formats will ensure that you won’t ever need to have your logo redrawn or re-created for use in future projects. After all, you own your logo—shouldn’t you be able to use it as well?
About the Author
Erin Ferree, founder of elf design, helps small businesses stand out from their competition so that they can connect with their best customers. She does this by working with business owners to define their brands, and then using that definition to create logos, marketing materials and websites that show how they shine.
She also believes that all of a business’s brand materials should be not just pretty, but also designed effectively and strategically. This produces a winning combination of materials that communicate visually, look stunning and are designed effectively, which help her clients reach their target audiences.
She writes about design, branding and marketing through her eBooks, her blog at www.not-just-pretty.com, and in free articles in her newsletter, “Stand Out”, which you can subscribe to at http://www.elf-design.com/newsletter.html.
9 Keys to an Effective Logo
Thursday, August 5, 2010
by Erin Ferree
Source: Elf Design
The right logo, with the right characteristics, will boost your visibility, credibility and memorablity – which means more business for you!
These characteristics include:
Consistency in use of your logo, tagline, materials. Repetition of similar elements, used in the same or similar ways, helps people to remember who you are and what you do.
The Catapult Advisors logo icon is used as a watermark across all of their materials, including their website.
Memorability, so that your logo stays at the forefront of your potential clients’ minds. That way, they’ll think of you next time they have a need.
A bold logo for The Paradigm Shifts begins to visually tell the story of what these transition coaches do.
Meaningfulness, so that your logo can spread the message about the distinguishing characteristics of your business.
Totally Tots designs and hand-creates baby blankets and hats, and also sells children’s toys online, all of which are shown in their logo.
Uniqueness, which helps you stand out from the crowd. For example, if everyone in your industry uses a particular symbol (i.e., travel agencies often use globes in their logos), try to use something else – that way, your logo doesn’t just look like everyone else’s.
Reilly travel agency specializes in Group Travel, and their logo symbolizes bringing together many different people into a single itinerary.
Professionalism, in the quality of the graphics, the printing and the paper on which your materials are printed.
Stylus Group printed their materials on a thick (100#) paper, and the printing was done by a traditional press process instead of by using a less expensive digital printing option.
Timelessness in your logo will ensure that you don’t have to redesign your logo in just a few years and that your investment and equity in your design will be lasting.
Expansion Consulting’s logo design does not speak to a particular time period, and provides them with a look that will work throughout the years.
Contrast between the colors in your logo – and not just in terms of hue, but in terms of value as well, so that it translates well either to black and white or greyscale and colorblind people are able to see it.
The green accent color used in Jaeger Associates’ logo is a vivid contrast to the coffee hues whether the logo is printed in color or black and white.
Unity among the different elements in the logo. The logo must fit together as a single unit, and not just appear as a jumble of elements pasted together.
The symbol and text in the Crescenda logo are sized to fit together within a bounding square, and all of the elements are appropriately sized to one another.
Scalability, so that your logo looks equally good on both a business card and on a sign for your business (or a billboard!), and at every size in between. Your business’s name should be legible at different logo sizes – be sure that your designer chooses a font that is easily readable.
The Dropwise Essentials logo is used in many sizes in the applications in their custom marketing package—from .75 inches wide on their lip balm labels to several feet wide on their trade show booth banner.
Having a professionally designed logo can really give your business a jumpstart and helps your business get the attention – and clients – you need to succeed.
About the Author
Erin Ferree, founder of elf design, helps small businesses stand out from their competition so that they can connect with their best customers. She does this by working with business owners to define their brands, and then using that definition to create logos, marketing materials and websites that show how they shine.
She also believes that all of a business’s brand materials should be not just pretty, but also designed effectively and strategically. This produces a winning combination of materials that communicate visually, look stunning and are designed effectively, which help her clients reach their target audiences.
She writes about design, branding and marketing through her eBooks, her blog at www.not-just-pretty.com, and in free articles in her newsletter, “Stand Out”, which you can subscribe to at http://www.elf-design.com/newsletter.html.
Recent Comments