Why You Should Have Multiple Logos

The combination of physical (offline) places and web (online) spaces creates millions of opportunities to get your logo into commerce and establish a brand identity. Each opportunity has its own strategy and benefits, but they all strive to point people in the direction of your company.

• Business cards
• Letterhead, invoices, forms, envelopes, in-house documents
• Marketing collateral (PDF handouts, flyers, slicks, tri-folds…)
• Product packaging (may fit into any of these categories)
• Signage and banners
• Car decals
• Stickers, labels
• Shirts and uniforms
• Logo apparel (t-shirts, hats, totes…)
• Promotional products (notebooks, pens, glasses, mugs, magnets…)

• Your website
• On other websites that link to yours
• Email signature
• Social media profiles
• Directories
• Online ads

These lists could go on!

As you’d expect, this is the main logo used to represent your brand. All other brand logos should be based on your primary logo design.

Alternate design(s), which can be vertical or horizontal. Alternate secondary logos tend to be stripped down, stacked, or unstacked versions of your primary logo.

A simple, mini-me version of your primary logo, which may include a limited abbreviation of your business name or a small illustration such as your symbol or mark. These are usually used as favicons to identify your website’s internet browser tab. They’re also great in social media profiles where the profile already displays your company name next to the image.

Also known as logotype or lettermarks, these focus solely on the business name, customized by a font. Great examples of effective wordmark logos are often very large, household-name companies. Examples include Google, FedEx, Coca-Cola, eBay, Facebook, Disney, and many more.

While Wordmark Logos are popular for large companies, they commonly use icons in their brand strategies to fit the various spaces.

Honestly, it’s often dependent on the final primary logo. To cover most spaces, you want a logo that fits into a few core shapes.

• Landscape (wide)
• Portrait (tall)
• Thin (super wide)
• Circle or Square

With one of these four types of logos, you’ll have an easier time fitting your logo in most places.

When done properly, your logo should be created in Adobe Illustrator (.ai or .eps). This helps ensure that your logo is produced in high resolution, vector art, with fonts outlined.

Designers will usually create your logo in Adobe Illustrator, and from there may save it in various formats for each variation including Adobe Photoshop (.psd), Adobe PDF (.pdf), JPG (.jpg), and PNG (.png). This will give you and your outside vendors options.

The reason we use Adobe Illustrator is that it’s a tool that creates vector graphics. Vector art is made up of points, lines, curves, and shapes that are based on mathematical formulas. This means that you can scale the artwork from ½-inch to 100-feet tall without losing any resolution quality. We all know what happens when you expand and contract a picture. Adobe has a very good resource for understanding What is vector art.

Most of the people, machines, tools, and software that creates the list of products and web graphics discussed earlier in this article are often unique to the industry. A machine that prints your logo onto the barrel of a pen at a one-half-inch scale is different than the sewing machine that embroiders your logo onto a shirt.

By having quality vector artwork, you’re setting all your future vendors up for success, and potentially saving you money by doing it right the first time. Vendors usually charge a fee to fix bad or low-quality files given to them. They will certainly charge you to take your low-resolution JPEG and rebuild it in vector art (or to fit the format of their machines).

It’s really helpful if you supply a style guide for logo usage to your vendor. A style guide usually also includes those different types of logos and how the elements of the logos should interact. That way, vendors can advise you on what size or logo is best for the specific application.

• Hardline items (pens, mugs, keychains, etc.) can be imprinted using silkscreen or pad printing machines. Both required printing plates and a digital setup.
• Softline products (apparel, uniforms, bags, hats, etc.) that are embroidered required digitizing the artwork to program the machine stitches. Products that utilize a sublimation method of decorating have digital design set-up requirements.
• Paper products (handouts, banners, decals, etc.) may involve mass printing, press, bindery, and/or large-scale machines.

All these printing methods require high-resolution, quality logo artwork to successfully process your branded products.

A designer is creating your company logos as your brand’s identity for visual usage in all future commerce. Your logo will be linked to your products, services, and social capital.

An experienced designer will work with you to match a mark, including typography and symbol that best relates your products and services to the image you intend to achieve.

The willingness to pay the cost of a great design is usually subjective to the company’s size and personality. The price of different types of logos is often dependent on how many versions it takes to get to the final design(s). Speculative work often includes variations before landing on the final design(s).

No matter your choices – consider having a few variations to fit into different spaces. In time, your logo will spread to online and offline marketing assets and will be used by outside vendors. You can always come back to the foundational Adobe Illustrator file and choose which type of logo is most appropriate for the job.

On the off-chance none of your core variations fit the specific project, that’s when you invite your designer or outside vendor to custom-fit your logo to the specs of the project.