Speaking of our logo and graphic treatment, there are a wide variety of considerations. For example, our first logo (immediately below) has some good elements and some bad elements. I like that the “P” forms the spine and page curl of a book, but I dislike the “fine lines” that make up the “pages” and the “curve” of the book along the left side of the “spine.” These lines don’t make for a very flexible logo because they “lose resolution” depending upon their application.
For instance, we were never able to successfully embroider this logo because it just… didn’t work. Also, some lines of the logo are so thin that at 300 dpi (the standard print resolution for digital printing), they don’t retain their sharpness. Always working with a vector graphic may have prevented or limited some of these problems but the fact of the matter is that graphics turn into rasterized images so quickly when they go from person to person or department to department that it seems to be impossible to use a vector graphic for almost anything. Again, just an example of the realities of business getting in the way of the ideals of business.
So while we plan on retaining this logo, we also wanted a treatment for our company name that was standardized, consistent, and removed some of the technical hurdles imposed by the logo above.
When creating a logo or name treatment style guide, there are other considerations to keep in mind, like the size of the image itself. Our whole name, Outskirts Press, is a little long. It’s not 4 characters, like NIKE, where you don’t have to worry about the horizontal footprint. There are some applications where a horizontal placement is preferred, but there are other applications where a vertical (or, more appropriately, a “stacked”) treatment works better. So we needed both a horizontal and a stacked treatment:
Then you have to define colors (the hex, RGB, and CMYK valuations) of the colors of the logo. This leads you to the realization that you may need two color versions, depending upon whether your logo is on a “white” background (above) or a “dark” background (not shown).
Even these two graphics above don’t look exactly right (they’ve been rasterized into .jpegs; not sure if the RGB equivalent was used rather than just a quick conversion to RGB from CMYK, etc.). So the colors look a little “off” and even the height/width ratio looks off, perhaps so they would both fit side by side within the parameters of this blog template. Hey, I’m not the designer. But it just goes to show, everything is always just a little more complicated than it first appears…
