Look Your Best
Over the years, I’ve put together lots of flyers, posters, and banners which feature recognition of sponsors who help to make events possible. The event organizers are typically running in several directions at once. When they send me the information, they often supply me with logos that are just copied from websites. Well, it’s one thing for that version of the logo to be viewed on a computer monitor. It’s a whole other matter to have it enlarged to appear on a street banner.
When low resolution logos (like ones on a website) are enlarged, they become fuzzy or pixelated. For a logo to be enlarged cleanly, it requires a particular format known as vector. What I often end up doing is hunting for a better logo to use on materials I design. Even on artwork submitted to me in final form, if I see a fuzzy logo, I will substitute a better one if I can.
It’s not always an easy task. In one scenario, I tried to contact the marketing department of a hospital. They had updated their tagline so the clean logo I had needed to be replaced. Well you’d think I was trying to break into Fort Knox. The receptionist at the hospital had no contact information at all for the marketing department. None. I gave her some names from information I found on LinkedIn but to no avail. My event contact was unavailable. A fast deadline led me to recreate the new tagline using a typeface as close as I could find to the one in the low resolution logo I had.
I want sponsors to be represented as best and professionally as possible. How can that be made easier?
All businesses, no matter how big or small, should have brand logos created in various formats appropriate for how they are to be used.
Those formats should be understood so when they are shared, the recipients are getting the proper formats. Formats could not only include logos for print or for the web, but also color logos, black and white logos, and even white logos used against a colored background.
A Brand Identity Guide is a fantastic tool that shows what a logo looks like, lays out what can and cannot be done with the logo, identifies the specific colors used in the logo, and names the typefaces used in the logo and/or taglines. As a graphic designer, I love it when I am supplied a Brand Identity Guide. I’ll tell you what. When you see logos all scrunched together on a poster or back of a t-shirt, that is not something that would typically be permissible in guidelines defined in a Brand Identity Guide.
Some websites even have areas where logos can be downloaded. What a thrill when I find that. Some organizations don’t want to allow that thinking the logos will be used without permission. In my mind, if someone wants to use your logo that way, they will find it somewhere on the internet. In the meantime, why not make it easier for the people who want you to look your best to have quick and easy access to your logo.