A logo has to work in one colour before it works in five
The gradient looks good on the screen it was designed on. The test that matters is what survives when the colour, the size and the detail are taken away.
Delta Media Services Design & Logo CreationsBranded Clothing
Brand identity is the most critical element of retail and business design — the graphic representation people come to associate with a company. Competition for customers is fierce, and a strong brand is what builds relevance, establishes trust and moves someone to act.
Which is a large claim to hang on a small drawing. So the drawing has to be tested, and the tests worth running are the unglamorous ones.
Test one: take the colour away
Print it in black. Then print it in white on black.
A mark that only holds together because two colours are sitting next to each other stops being a mark the moment it is engraved, embossed, etched into glass, stitched in a single thread, faxed, photocopied or reproduced in a newspaper that prints in one colour. All of those are still real places a logo lands.
The one-colour version is not a fallback you make later. It is the drawing, and the colour version is the drawing with colour added.
Test two: make it small
Reproduce it at fifteen millimetres wide. That is roughly a stitched chest logo, a favicon, the head of a letterhead, the corner of a business card.
Detail that dissolves at that size was never carrying meaning — it was carrying craft, and craft that nobody can see is cost with no return. Embroidery is the harshest version of this test, because thread has a minimum size below which a shape simply stops being that shape.
Test three: describe it over the phone
If you cannot say what the mark is in one sentence, neither can your customer. That is not a design rule so much as a memory rule: people recall a shape they can name.
Test four: put it where it is going
A mark is rarely seen on its own. It is seen on the side of a van doing 60, above a shopfront at dusk, on a polo across a room, on a menu in low light. Each of those has a viewing distance and a lighting condition, and a mark can pass every test above and still fail in the one place the business actually needs it.
This is the part we insist on. Many designers throw the word branding around without much interest in what it means. We would rather ask the questions and do the research to answer them, so that what gets built sits on a foundation rather than on a mood board.
What you should end up owning
Whoever draws your logo, make sure you leave with all of this, and make sure you have it in your own hands rather than in someone else’s inbox:
- Vector master files. These are the source. Everything else is generated from them, and without them every future job starts with a redraw — which is a real cost, charged to you, for something you already paid for once.
- A one-colour version, positive and reversed.
- Raster exports at a few sizes, for the web and for anyone who cannot open a vector file.
- The colour values — the print build and the screen build, written down, not remembered.
- The fonts, named, with whatever licence they were used under.
Businesses come to us regularly needing a logo rebuilt from a low-resolution JPEG because that was all they were ever given. It is always redrawable. It is never free.