Halcyon Logo Design - professional corporate logo designers

Logo design serviceLogo portfolioPackages & pricesOrderLogo design FAQsAbout company logosTestimonials

What makes a good corporate logo?

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.

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 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.)

Corporate logo file formats

Logo file formats can be grouped into two fundamentally different types. These are vector images and bitmapped images. Logos are normally created using software packages such as CorelDRAW® (*.cdr) or Adobe Illustrator® (*.ai) and saved as a vector image in the native format.

These images are described mathematically in terms of curves and vectors. This allows them to be scaled (and printed) to any size with no loss in resolution. Examples of vector formats include:

• Encapsulated Postscript (*.eps)
  This format is the industry standard for printing. It is readable by both PC and Macs.
   
• Adobe Illustrator® (*.ai)
  This format serves as a 'source file' for your logo design, in that it can be used to generate other formats including EPS and bitmaps. It is important to keep a copy of your logo in this format.

Bitmaps are images composed of a grid of individually coloured squares (pixels). When viewed at an appropriate resolution the grid appears smooth. Unlike vector images, bitmaps cannot easily be rescaled without any loss in resolution. Resizing bitmaps usually results in a pixellated (jagged) effect. Bitmaps can be found on the web in a range of formats.

• GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)
  GIF images can show a maximum of 256 colours. For this reason they are not suitable to display photographs. GIFs use lossless compression which is especially effective with simple images that contain large repetitive areas.
   
• JPG/JPEG (Joint Photographic (Experts) Group)
  This type of bitmap is well suited to photographs or complex images, due to its lossy compression. This form of compression takes advantage of the fact that the eye cannot distinguish between very similar colours.
• PNG (Portable Network Graphics)
  PNG bitmaps are similar to GIFs in that they also employ lossless compression. However, PNGs can display full colour images, unlike the 256 colours of GIFs.
   
• TIFF (Tagged Image File Format)
  These are usually high resolution (300 dpi) images that are used in word processed documents.