New graphic treatment for Outskirts Press

Speaking of Version 4 of our new website, tentatively launching this summer, Version 4 will also mark the “official” appearance of our new graphic treatment.

I say “official appearance” because the new “Outskirts Press” graphic already appears on our Twitter account, and by the time Version 4 launches, it will have also appeared in a number of advertisements, both offline and on. Recently we made the change to the masthead of our newsletter to feature it, as well.

And I call it a “graphic treatment” rather than a logo because we’re not ready to completely abandon our current logo:

This logo appears on the spines of too many books to erradicate it entirely.

But, we are interested in conforming to a more precise usage of our company name.  Up until this “version 4 graphic treatment” our design style sheet as it relates to our company name has been… well… empty. In other words, we didn’t have a “style” for it, per se.   Our name appears in one font on our publishing brochure, another in our guide, probably still another on our marketing brochure, and yet a different one on our website.

I may be exaggerating, but not by much.  The point is, we were too busy growing by 850.5% to worry about things like “style sheets” for our name and logo.  Is that the proper way to do things? Hard to say — one can’t argue with success. But it certainly isn’t the “common” way of doing things.  When most businesses start, one of the first thing business owners or entrepreneurs do is invest time, resources, and money(none of which they have a surplus of) on “fun” things like logos, business cards, letterhead, shirts, hats, etc. And I don’t blame them.  Doing all that stuff is a lot more fun than, you know… working. 

Outskirts Press started in 2002 and only now, 8 years later, have we started to produce shirts, hats, pens and other promotional items featuring our company name. And yes, the creation of material products like that required the creation of a style sheet for our name, which I will get into more with a future post, but which I will also reveal here now…