Black And White...

When it comes to the nuts and bolts of your brand, the actual logo image itself is at the center of attention, or at least it should be. In order to make sure that your logo is always the star-of-the-show, it needs to be designed in a manner that is easily reproduced across a wide variety of media. All too often, we have clients come in with a slick new logo that is hardly usable unless they are uploading to a website or printing in full-color. In most cases these logo designs have all sorts of gradient blends and shading that cannot be reproduced well if at all in a grey scale or line version when necessary. PhotoShop is indeed both a blessing and a curse.

At our design firm, Tactix Creative, we actually made a rule that a designer could not use PhotoShop to create a logo, and that every logo presented to our creative director must be easily rendered as a simple black and white line-art image. Only then was a designer able to start treating the logo with other colors and/or additional embellishments. Sure, you may want to treat your logo in PhotoShop at some point for added pizazz in certain applications. But don’t ever let a designer paint your brand into the “full-color or nothing” corner! It will be nothing but a headache and you will most likely end up redoing it at some point.
Designers need to remember that they are not creating fine art pieces. They are designing for reproduction purposes. Your logo needs to be at home anywhere and everywhere you may need it. Whether on your website, business card, black and white invoice or a low-res fax… your designer owes you a usable version of your logo/brand for any potential environment. This may sound like a no-brainer to everyone… but we deal with these problem images nearly everyday in our firm.

Make sure when your new logo design is done, that you receive electronic files in their native format, and demand vector image files when at all possible. Gradient blends are evil :)