In business, branding is important and this involves a logo. The logo is a visual piece of art representing your product or service.

There are rules to making logos; it isn’t something where you can just whip up any old thing and throw it out there. Why? Because if it’s designed improperly it will inevitably cost you (possibly a lot of money).

If you design your logo right the first time you can achieve maximum coverage for the least cost.

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The trick to designing a logo is actually very simple if you remember the monochrome rule. The rule is “If it doesn’t look as black on white or white on black, it sucks.”

We’ll use the PCMech text logo as an example:

Above: Simple black on white.

Above: Simple white on black.

What makes this logo work is that it will look the same whether on-screen or printed.

If you’re logo doesn’t do this, it will not work.

Here is an example of a bad logo.

The above looks “cool” and has a nice 3D effect to it. But let’s see what happens when we black/white this thing.

Terrible. Absolutely terrible. The image is ruined.

Some would say “Hey that’s only monochrome! My printer can do more than that!”

True enough, it can. Let’s see how that would look.

Looks good on-screen in B/W, but printed it will most likely look like this:

Or if in color, this:

Printers have never been able to exactly replicate what you see on-screen primarily because what you see on-screen is backlit whereas on paper it’s not.

And even if you hire a professional printing service for your logo OR decide to put your logo on business cards, it’s most likely true the result won’t be what you envisioned.

If you stick to monochrome (or at bare minimum, grayscale) your logo will always look perfect.

Another example, the Yahoo! logo.

This is the Yahoo! logo:

If “downgraded” to grayscale, it looks like this:

If “reversed” from that point, it looks like this:

This is a good logo. It looks the same no matter what you do with it. That is your goal with your logo. It should be recognizable in any form whether colorized, grayscaled or printed.

Things to avoid when creating a logo

Gradients, Fades and Shadows

Example encompassing all of the above:

This is a nasty horrible logo. The fade/gradient will look terrible when printed, the text is too light in color and the shadow will “spot” when printed. Bad, bad, bad all around.

Anything 3D

Example:

You should never EVER use three-dimensional text for a logo. This type of art is without a doubt the most difficult to work with. It only works on a web site as a logo, but not in an e-mail signature and certainly not in print.

“But my printer will print anything I want, why should I bother with any of this?”

Anyone in business knows that printing things yourself is the worst way to save a buck because the plain fact of the matter is that you don’t save anything in the long run. You’re printing your logos in the first place because what you have is most likely full of too much color and the no-no’s listed above.

If you stick to the monochromatic/grayscale rule and only keep the colorized stuff for the web site (and maybe business cards), farming out your black/white printing is the most cost effective way to do it.

I’ll put it to you another way:

If your logo looks great in grayscale you can run off 500 B/W copies (or as many as needed) of your template at a local FedEx Kinko’s for far less than it would be to print it yourself.

If you can get a plain black-on-white version of your logo, that is the absolute best way to print up business cards – you can put more cash towards raised ink and card material rather than color (big cost saver).

In all seriousness – get your logo working in monochrome/grayscale. It will serve you well if you do so.

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