Logos
Design Jargon Translated – Vectors
It’s Monday. Time for me to translate some design jargon into plain English, just for you. Today we’re talking vectors!
Here’s the scenario: Your designer is cooking up a new set of marketing materials for you. You have all the ingredients together. You’ve have copy written, you’ve searched through your files, found a .jpg file of your logo, and sent it all over to your designer and now…
Your designer says: “I need your logo in vector format not raster.”
“What’s wrong with the .jpg I sent?” you ask.
Nothing. It’s perfectly fine, except it’s already baked. Done. Crispy. Toasted. It can only be what it is, just a little .jpg.
Your logo in a vector format is like sugar cookie dough. It’s all ready to be rolled out and cut into shapes. It’s malleable. Smooth vector lines (usually created in Illustrator) allow your designer to scale your logo up, scale your logo down, adjust the color and then save it out into whatever format, size and resolution is needed for the marketing pieces you want.
Your logo in a raster format is like a baked cookie. It’s much harder for your designer to take a raster (.jpg, .tif, .png, .gif, .psd) format logo and make adjustments. It’s like trying to take that baked sugar cookie and give it different shape without destroying it. The only way to do it is to take a bite. Then there you are with a half-eaten cookie and an unprofessional logo.
So now you are on a hunt for your logo in vector format. When you’re searching your files look for a file that ends in .eps or .ai. The most common vector formats.
If you don’t have a vector file of your logo, your designer may want to recreate your logo in vector format. Let them do this. Pay them for the extra work and make sure they give you a copy of files for future use. That way you’ll have the ingredients you need the next time you want to cook up some marketing materials.
Come back next Monday and I’ll explain more about raster files or maybe I’ll just talk about cooking, I’m kinda hungry over here.
Do online businesses need a logo?
I keep getting emails asking the same question: “Do I really even need a logo? All I want is a header for my website.”
Maybe you are asking yourself the same question. Why go through the whole logo creation process and cost when your business name (in a stellar font, of course) can just be part of your header?
To answer those questions, I want you to stop for just a minute and dream a little about your business.
You have big places to go. You are going to be a business that markets itself. You’ll need an opt-in, an ebook, a Twitter background, a Facebook landing page and a YouTube channel. You’ll start speaking at conferences, hosting your own retreats and writing a New York Times bestseller. You are going to get out of that corner bedroom/office and want a business card to hand out.
In living that dream you’ve outgrown your header and now need a logo.
Why? Because that little JPEG header file isn’t flexible enough to help you with the creative aspects of all those marketing plans. Your header was created to fit a certain horizontal space on your website and nothing more.
Your JPEG header can’t tell you what font the designer used to make your name look so sharp, it can’t be scaled up to make a sign for your booth at a conference and it won’t print nicely on your business card.
Unless you’ve created the header yourself and or received the source files and other information from your designer, you’ll find yourself without the files and information you need to move ahead as quickly as you could with all of your marketing plans.
So, “Yes, you really do need a logo.”
But, what does that mean? Should you stop everything and hire a designer to create you a full graphic logo with a brand mark?
You can certainly do that. Or you can hire a designer to create a typography based logo for you. Or you can pick out a font you like and always format your business name in that font in your marketing materials.
If you decide to hire a designer here are the source files and information you’ll want to receive as part of the logo design package:
- Logo in color & black/white vector format (.eps, or .ai) for use in printed pieces (business cards/brochures) and signage (where your logo needs to scale without losing resolution).
- Logo in raster format (.tif, .jpg, .gif) for use on your website, email marketing and other multimedia.
- Logo in transparent format (.png) for use on your website, email marketing and other multimedia.
- Information on the colors used in your logo (this may include: Pantone colors, CMYK values, RGB values or hex codes).
- Information about the fonts used in your logo (name of font, where to buy).
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