1. Keep your logo simple – an over complicated logo will appear harder to read the smaller it is, you also need to consider how your logo will look in other media’s i.e. sign-writing in cut vinyl
2. Do not add tone to your logo – once again, tone is impossible to replicate in cut vinyls, and may also appear differently if using the logo in black and white, or printed at lower resolution i.e. newsprint.
3. Do not use raster images – as someone who works with print you will be familiar with why we prefer using vector images or at least a minimum of 300dpi, otherwise you run the risk of the logo appearing pixelated when it is scaled up.
4. Your logo should be scalable – again, as above you need a logo that doesn’t lose quality when it is scaled up, think billboards, or large posters.
5. Do not use too many colours – the more colours you use, the more visually distracting the logo becomes, making it harder for the viewer to see what it actually represents.
6. Too many fonts kill the charm – at the most stick to two fonts, the ‘the 10 commandments of typography’ which you can find here does a good job of explaining why this rule is important.
7. Do not outline your logo – adding an outline or ‘stroke’ to your logo adds nothing, again its a visual distraction adding more noise.
8. Do not write on your logo – a seemingly obvious one, your logo should convey enough information in the text part of it, without having to add text to the logo itself.
9. Avoid putting the logo in a box – there shouldn’t be a reason for putting a box around your logo, it should be able to hold itself together well enough without needing a frame.
10. And lastly, flat doesn’t mean an icon – just because the current trend is ‘flat design’ doesn’t mean that it has to look like an app icon.

Credit to Designmantic for the original artwork

The post The 10 Commandments of Logo Design first appeared on Newman Thomson.

One other thing regarding colours to consider is that of black, for text a single colour black is perfectly fine. However if you are looking to use large areas of black a single colour black can appear a bit ‘greyish’ in hue, a common solution here is to use what’s known as a rich black, or 4 colour black. As the name would suggest, this is where a 100% K black is enhanced by the addition of the other 3 print colours. The usual CMYK breakdown for a rich black is C-50% M-50% Y-50% and K-100%.

PMS Colours, PMS is the abbrevation for Pantone Matching System. Simply put, the PMS is a way of guaranteeing the appearance of a colour over a variety of materials. Commonly used by very large brands who are represented across the globe, the PMS allows you to ensure continuity by rendering your chosen colour, identically, no matter where it is, what material it is on, or what process has been used to produce it. For example, Ford use Pantone 294C in their famous blue oval logo, this ensures that the specific blue is replicated exactly the same across the world, and across any materials (signage, print, clothing etc.) in which it features. However, most brands probably don’t need that sort of colour control (which can be fairly expensive), and a traditional CMYK breakdown will suffice. As always, if you want any more info regarding this or any other area of printing, do please get in touch, collectively we have centuries (probably) worth of knowledge which we’ll gladly impart.

The infographic below details what the main differences are between CMYK, RGB and Pantone colours:

Credit for original infographic to thelogocompany.net

The post Print colour profiles explained first appeared on Newman Thomson.