About Logo Design

All good contemporary logos share some common characteristics. Most importantly, a logo must be visually appealing and distinctive. An original and eye-catching design will be more memorable. A good logo should have a style and choice of colours that are appropriate for the company it represents.
In today's market place logos are displayed on all kinds of media. For this reason it's important that logos are scalable and can be reproduced in a variety of sizes and formats. Logos should also have well defined colours that can be reproduced with high levels of consistency.

Corporate logo design styles

Logos can be loosely categorised into types according to the emphasis placed on text and graphics and the style of graphics. For a designer the important thing is knowing which style is most appropriate for a given organisation.

Text Only (Logotype)
These have very little or no graphical component. The company name is the dominant feature of the logo. These can make extremely effective logos. Well known examples include CNN and Virgin.

Graphics Only
The graphics may represent the company or its business in some meaningful way or may be non-specific in nature. Such graphics often tend to look simpler and more striking. The Nike Swoosh is a classic example.

Text and Graphics (Combination)
These place equal emphasis on text and graphics. This is the most common type of logo.

Illustrative Logo

This style is often characterised by complex artwork produced with any number of colours. Logos with detailed illustration sometimes don't look good when printed at small scales.


Corporate logo colours


There are two colour printing systems that are used by professional print shops. They are known as the Process Colour System and Spot Colour System.

Process colour system


This printing system is often called 4-Colour Printing or CMYK. This method of printing involves the mixing of four colours (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) to produce almost any colour. Images are split into four colour component plates. When combined they result in an image with a very high level of colour accuracy.
This system is best suited to images that contain a large number of different colours, such as photographs. Its main advantage is that the cost is independent of the number of colours. One disadvantage of CMYK can be reduced colour consistency. The actual colours printed may vary between images, depending on the ink and paper used and other factors.

Spot colour system

Spot Colour Printing makes use of a specific range of colours. Unlike the process colour system, colours are premixed. There are a number of spot colour systems, but the most common is the Pantone Matching System (PMS). The range of Pantone colours are defined by a code and are usually displayed in swatch books, similar to household paints.

This method is recommended if you require images to be printed with very high levels of colour consistency. The disadvantage is that printing costs increase with the number of colours to be printed. Generally speaking, spot colour printing is more suitable for images with fewer than 4 colours.

(Remember that Pantone colours may appear slightly different when displayed on computer monitors. If you require a precise colour then you should choose them from a swatch book.)

logo file formats

Vector Formats - Your Logo Source Files

Every professional logo design begins as a VECTOR based image. VECTOR graphics are created with industry standard vector editing applications such as Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand. These images are made up of precise lines and curves that are infinitely editable and scalable without any image degradation. Their incredibly small file sizes make them efficient for storage as well as electronic transmission.

These "source files" of your logo are the master files from which all other formats of your logo can be created. Traditional print vendors will require a VECTOR format of your logo to reproduce colour accurately and without the size limitations inherent of RASTER based images.

Creative Fusion will provide you with two VECTOR format image files of your logo design. (.EPS and .AI)

Raster Formats

The raster images of your logo can be used on web sites and other forms of electronic reproduction, but generally not for traditional printing.

RASTER formats are also called BITMAPS or PIXEL based formats because they are made up of pixels on a grid - with each pixel consisting of a solid colour. When viewed from a distance, these pixels give the optical illusion of being a solid shape. Photographs are stored in raster format.

RASTER images have a fixed resolution and cannot be resized without image degradation. RASTER images have much larger file sizes than vector graphics and are often compressed to reduce their size.

Most RASTER images can be converted to other bitmap-based formats very easily. However, to create a VECTOR based image from a RASTER format requires a complete recreation of the art using vector drawing software, and may not result in a completely accurate version of your logo.

Creative Fusion will provide you with three RASTER format image files of your logo design. (.GIF, .JPEG and .TIF)