Tech Trends

At 3Floors our main clients are small to medium sized businesses that most often have nobody on staff with graphic design skills. When helping clients who fit this profile with design work more times than not we are offered logos with substandard quality. A poor file means poor quality print and difficult digital use. When paying a designer on an hourly a poor file will cost you because of the time it takes to clean up edges for blending into a design. Here is some help with the basics on how to protect yourself from having to deal with quality loss.

Avoid poor quality altogether by following these rules when getting a logo design from a designer:

1. Have your final logo files delivered in a Vector file format. Here is a good explanation of the difference: Bitmap vs. Vector
2. If you won’t be able to burn a duplicate disk yourself, have them provide you with a Master Copy and a Loaner Copy so you can loan one out to designers and printers while keeping a master copy in your safety deposit box.
3. Have your designer convert any fonts to outlines to avoid font issues when submitting your logo for inclusion in materials.
4. Your designer should also include any original font files on the Master and Loaner disk in case you ever want to modify or evolve the logo.
5. Even if your color is spot color specific, make sure you have a CMYK and RGB file option ready to go. Those are the workhorse files when your design ventures outside your organisation.

The following tips will maintain quality and save time when submitting your logo to a designer or publication for inclusion:

1. Always submit a Vector file if possible. These usually are files ending in AI, EPS, PDF. These file types are not guaranteed to be vector, because it is possible to include a bitmapped image inside a vector-capable file format, but it is your best bet when compared to JPG, GIF, BMP and PNG. These four are never vector. If all you have are the non-vector options you should send as large a file as possible to ensure lots of detail.
2. Know what color is required. “One color” is your black only logo, “Four color” is your CMYK version, and any digital or web work will use your RGB version.
3. Don’t put your image in a Word document. Never expect a quality image back out of a Microsoft Word document. It is fine if you want to put an image in the Word file for a layout or placement example, but be sure to additionally include the original design or image file separately with your submission.
4. Email is king. Even disks are cumbersome these days. Not to mention, they may not even arrive in one piece if shipped. Send your vector file by email unless it is over 5MB. By nature vector art is smaller in file size than bitmap art so it is likely that your files will fly just fine by email.

When in doubt, ask the designer what format works best for them. They’ll be gleeful if you have vector to offer, and impressed if you ask whether they need CMYK or RGB.

One more note 1 in 5 small businesses that I take on projects for don’t have good files of their logo and their designer “isn’t available” to get them copies of files. Don’t let this happen to you. Save your master disk. If this is you, however, here are a couple things to try that just might put you back in business with a file.

Try this tips if you’ve already completely lost your original logo files:

1. Call your designer. Even if he “doesn’t do it anymore” your designer may have the file for you.
2. Call the company that printed your business cards, posters, signage, letterhead or designed your web site. We have archives of all old client logos and artwork. If your then-reliable designer had given us his vector file, we could shoot it to you in an email.
3. If you have a web site and your site is flash your logo may be vector in that SWF file on your web server. Save that SWF and have a pro flash designer look for you.
4. Check your old email archives if possible.

I hope this helps any small business owners make sense of how to handle logo files and what logo files to handle. More importantly, I hope it helps you all keep safe a little designer-sanity [if it exists].