The key piece to any visual consistency in a company is the logo. Everything can come from the logo – colours used throughout marketing elements, a general feel for anything from business cards to websites. If you don’t have a logo, or don’t have a good one, you can find yourself having a tough time being consistent throughout various marketing mediums because you do not have a strong base.
There are a few key things to consider and remember when putting a logo together and one of the most important is ensuring you have a high quality logo. Some companies use photos in their logo, but most companies are tending to move away from that because a computer generated image is the easiest to keep looking the best. The reason is that photographs are made up of pixels, the higher quality/larger size the image is the more pixels (and thus smoother image) you get. So if you have a poor quality image and you try and use it for a billboard it will look rough and grainy. A computer based image can be done with vector instead of pixels and then holds its smoothness regardless of size. Let’s look at an example with a basic circle:
Original image:
Now let’s zoom in on the image, left is what it would look like if we zoomed in and it was a traditional picture file, right is what it would look like if it was a vector file:
Now think of some of the ways that you might use your logo. Sure business cards, brochures, etc, those you do not have to worry about too much. But let’s say you wanted to put a great wrap on your car, make a nice tradeshow booth, or maybe you wanted to do a billboard ad. When you enlarge your logo, is it going to be an ugly circle like the left or like the nice high-quality circle on the right? We all know which one we’d want anyway! So remember that when you get your logo designed – ALWAYS have a vector image available. You can save the file as the traditional “pixel” image for various uses, but being able to go back to the vector image for different projects is very important.
