Need to know about Logos:

Avoid having a highly complex design as your firm’s logo. Your logo will most likely be used for many purposes: business cards and letterhead, outdoor designs, the Internet and promotional items such as T-shirts and mugs. The logo has to look good when resized to fit on a small 2"x 3.5" business card (see image above). If the design is complex a lot of detail will be lost when the logo is shrunk to fit on the card and people might not be able to make out the design. Elaborate designs can be difficult and expensive to put on T-shirts and mugs.

Complex or over-the-top designs can mean high printing costs. A decision to have a highly complex logo for your firm can come back to haunt you. This doesn't mean that your logo has to be simple (and boring) for it to work. An elegant logo can enhance your firm's professional image. The trick is to find the right balance between design and functionality, where you have a great design that you can use for all purposes.

Try to keep the number of people who are involved in deciding upon your logo design as small as possible. Having multiple people giving multiple directions can significantly complicate the design process. If at all possible, try to limit the number of people directly involved decision to three. A "committee" type approval process could cause a stalemate in deciding upon a design. Logo Design 99 can only accept orders when the number of people involved in approving the design is three or less. If any more are involved it becomes very hard to finalize a design.

Try to limit the number of colors in the logo: The reason should be fairly obvious. You want to keep printing costs down and you can best achieve this by limiting the colors in the logo.

The color system used in professional printing is different than the color system used on your computer monitor: Your computer monitor uses 3 colors to create the images you see on your computer screen: Red, Green and Blue. With professional printing, 4 colors are used: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. This is called Process printing. The important thing to know here is that there are certain colors than cannot be duplicated with process colors. Rich blue and greens (such as royal blue) cannot be duplicated exactly with process colors.

Look at the graphic at right and notice the royal blue dot at top left. Your computer monitor can duplicate this color correctly as it uses the RGB color system. The blue dot to the right of this is an example of how the color might turn out when it is printed with process colors. Fortunately, Process color printing can duplicate a wide range of colors. However, if your design will have rich blues or greens (like royal blue) then you are going to have to use a Pantone color. Pantone colors are not combinations of different colors (like RGB or CMYK), they are premixed inks that your printer can use to print your logo design. If you have ever been to a paint store you will always find a color swatch with samples of various colors. Your printer will have someone like this: a Pantone swatch book showing the different colors that you can choose.

So, if your logo design will have rich blues/greens then you will have to use a Pantone color, otherwise you are fine using the CMYK (Process) color system.

How you plan to use your design should be a major factor in the design of the logo: Think about how you are going to use the logo and build the design to meet your specific needs. If you are going to use it primarily in faxes then you need a sharp one-color design with no gradients so that the design will look good when faxed. On the other hand, if your logo is only going to be used in the Internet then you have tremendous artistic freedom for the complexity and the number of colors in the design, as printing costs will not be a factor.

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