Moderators: John, Sharon, Fossil, Lucky Poet, crusty_bint, Jazza, dazza
1. THOU SHALT WORK IN FUCKING ILLUSTRATOR. I'm not shitting you here. You DO NOT produce a logo in photoshop unless there is NO OTHER WAY. Wanna know why? What if you want to change colors on the fly? What if you have an outline but you want to downsize the logo and the outline becomes a rancid smudge of gray pixels? What if, god protect us, a customer asks for SPOT COLORS? Pantone? What if they want a PDF? Or, the best, what if they want to print your 2000 pixel wide logo ON THEIR VAN? Horror of horrors! Illustrator provides you with easy options for all of this, for illustrator is VECTOR. That's right. You can blow it up to screen it on the moon, or you can scale it down to fit a promotional ballpen, and it will look sweet kids, i guarantee you it will look sweeter than a virgin's ass. But there is more to illustrator, and why it is the start and end of all things logo...
2. THOU SHALT KEEP THY LOGO FUCKING SIMPLE. Yeah, that's you i'm talking to, you there with the fucking bevel on the logo and the steel texture and the glow and the fire fucking filter on top of it. That's not a logo, it's a mutilated, raped creature, an abomination in the eyes of the lord. Let's settle this for once and for all: a logo is an outline. It has no texture, it has no glows, it has nothing but a vector outline, filled with a color of your choice. That's why you work in illustrator: IT HAS NO EFFECTS. No matter if your logo is just type or an icon, it will be an outline and a fill and nothing more. If your customer wants to add fire and dragons and candy, sure, they paid for it, but you will not. You WILL deliver a logo that is just that; outline and fill.
3. THOU SHALT MAKE THY LOGO SCALABLE. I think it's really cool you made your type out of leprechaun brushes, really, but now scale that logo down so it fits on your customer's business card. Oh wait, can't see the leprechauns now can you? Righto. Customers will want their logo on everything, and i mean everything. From 60x60 mail icons to billboards, and your logo must accomodate that. Therefore you will make your logo so that if it's tatooed on the pinky finger of your newborn sister, it will still be legible from 200 metres distance.
4. THOU SHALT LEARN OF PRINTABLE COLORS. Illustrator has a nice bunch of Pantone swatches. What's pantone? A trademarked world-wide color matching system that ensures that what your put in your logo will be understood properly by the person who will be printing it. TIP: go out and buy a pantone swatchbook NOW so that you know how the colors you pick on screen will look when printed. Trust me, the differences can be horrifying.
5. THOUH SHALT OBEY THE BASIC RULES OF DESIGN. Just because your logo is for your brothers little skatepunk band doesn't mean it should look like something a bird shat out on top of a rorschach test. You WILL think about composition, color, balance, and all those other fun things that determine what looks like a rape scene and what looks like sweet love making hollywood style. That means that if someone's logo is BLAH with the accompanying text la la la, you WILL make sure BLAH outweighs la la la and has the focus of the viewer. It also means that everyone, even the old blind woman from Georgia, must be able to read what the logo says in under 5 milliseconds. There is more to this though: watch your goddamn type spacing, the space between the letters, If your font somehow renders it wrongly, break it up and space by hand or it will look like donkey ass.
6. THOU SHALT STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM DUMB FONTS. That's the easy part, people. Noone wants to see the all-caps badly spacing bitmap font some korean 15 year old offered for download on his livejournal. If your customer is paying, you have no excuse not to buy a nice license for a properly designed font family that magically includes things such as ligatures, special characters and even punctuation marks, just in case your customer, like, would want some type other than the logo but in the same typeface.
It's this easy, really. Now go forth and reproduce logos that will make your parents proud.
THY LOGO MUST LOOK GOOD IN BLACK AND WHITE AS WELL AS COLOR. Reasons covered above, I'm repeating it because it's so damn important. Same goes for having one that looks good when it's really, really tiny.
THOU SHALT HAVE MORE THAN ONE LOGO TREATMENT. What mean by this is that you need to be able to support many different sizes and shapes that it could possibly fit in. If you have a really wide logo and you have to fit it into a square space you're sort of boned. Other times you may have the freedom to include a tagline or something like that and you'll want to be able to. Also make sure that your logo looks good with the colors inverted.
THOU SHALT CONVERT ALL TYPEFACES IN THY LOGO TO OUTLINES. Back when I was doing print it wasn't that rare to get an illustrator file with a logo in it and some obscure-ass font that no one in the shop had ever heard of [let alone had a copy of] that they didn't see fit to include.
LET THY LOGO RUN FREE! Make sure there's enough space around our logo for it to stand out.
THY LOGO IS WORTH MANY PIECES OF SILVER. A good logo and brand are the main contact point for your customers. A god brand will help people remember your businesswebsite/band in a good way and a poor one will help people forget that you exist. Defend your logo against poor usage. Don't expect brilliance for the price of a steak dinner and if you're a designer bill people a decent amount.
IF THOU HAST A LOGO, THY WORK IS NOT YET DONE. The logo is just a summary for a brand, and that message must carry through on all relevant business cards, signs, t-shirts, websites and whatever other collateral the business/organization produces. A Brand frequently includes guidelines for what typefaces are included and other things. If your client doesn't want to pay you to do this, at least give them some simple guidelines.
Sharon wrote:Draw a bonnet!
purplegrum wrote:I should just save the hassle and get a quote from Infinite-Eye!
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