“Put your make-up on already!!!”
Your identity is like your driver’s license. It has your picture that shows what you look like, it identifies you with your contact information and while a driver’s license uses a number to track you … your business’ identity will use a more visual means to burn into the minds of your customers … who you are, what you look like and why they care.
In this section we’ll cover the elements that make up your identity, putting together one that really works and little secrets for things like printing of materials in a way that will save you ton’s of money!
LOGO
“Smile for the camera!!!”
A logo is to your business, as your photograph on your license is to you. It quickly identifies you in a visual manner. It will speak volumes about you to your audience, without ever saying a word.
When creating your logo, you need to take a few things into consideration. First, who are you? What do you represent? What do you want the viewer to feel or think when they look at you or think of you? What is the mood you want to create?
In coming up with a logo, you need to plan for a full color version, a grayscale version and a black and white version. Why? Well, rest assured there are going to be many ways you will need to represent your logo based upon your available cash to spend and what the displaying medium requires.
FULL COLOR LOGO:
Your color logo is great for your website, for when you can print things reasonably on your color inkjet printer, for web advertising, etc … and for any color advertisements you might be fortunate enough to afford or that has been donated to you.
You must remember that printing in full color is expensive and does not become cost effective until you are printing in quantities of multiple thousands depending upon the piece. Unless you are dealing with digital reproduction (for want of a better term, color copying but much more advanced). While this can still be expensive, when you compare cost-per-piece with the short quantities you want to run, it’s much more cost effective for a small business.
GRAYSCALE LOGO:
Is a fabulous representation that can be used in quality black and white photocopying and can be used by a smart commercial printer (or graphic artist), to be able to give you a splash of color with using only 1 or 2 colors of ink on a press.
Using shades of black can give the impression of more colors, more depth, than black and white alone, while being less expensive to reproduce than full color.
BLACK AND WHITE LOGO:
You will always need a good clean high resolution black and white file of your logo for many purposes such as providing to those who need it for general business advertising (i.e. the yellow pages, newspapers, magazines, community guides, etc). It’s what you will use when you cannot afford full color and when your grayscale logo will not reproduce very well in that medium.
It is also a handy thing to have if you ever choose to hand off anything to a graphic artist. With this file, they can properly colorize and place your logo into any sort of environment needed.
FONTS
“Is that what you’re wearing?”
Your font selection is sometimes your entire logo yet it also sets a mood for your message. When selecting fonts, there should be no more than 2 used in your identity representation (i.e. logo and business name) and perhaps one or two others used for content. Mixing too many fonts together makes for a messy message that people can’t get through, don’t understand and/or creates negative thoughts about your organizational skills.
SERIF VS. SANS-SERIF VS. FANCY, VS. CALLIGRAPHIC:
There are four basic classifications of fonts: serif; sans-serif; fancy or artistic fonts; and script or calligraphy. For those of you who do not already know, a serif is a tail at the end of a letter such as seen in Times New Roman below:
See how the ends of the S flip up and the ends of the T flip down? Those little “flips” are serif’s making this font, a serif font.
Sans meaning “without” means that a sans-serif font is without serifs, such as Arial or Helvetica:
Notice that the ends of each letter end abruptly, straight, no flipping tails. The same holds true for the content you are reading in this book. The absence of these little “tails” or “flips” makes this font “without serifs” or part of the sans-serif family.
FANCY FONTS:
These can also be called artistic fonts. They are interesting fonts such as handwriting, or fonts with little pictures as part of the letters. Here is a small example of a few interesting ones:
CALLIGRAPHY OR SCRIPT:
Other options include calligraphic fonts, elegant scripts and fonts that mimic handwriting, or represent elegant handwriting of old such as the samples below:
COMBINING FONTS:
Just as some colors or fabrics clash … so do fonts. Putting, for example, Edwardian Script with Freestyle Script … would be an example of clashing. Combining perhaps Times New Roman with Californian would show little to no differentiation between the two fonts. Two serif fonts … or two fancy fonts together, just don’t work. The fancy fonts clash more than the serif’s, but the two serif fonts together, minimally, don’t complement each other very well and lend themselves to clashing or not being noticed as different in the first place.
A magnificent font combination is one serif font with one sans-serif font, such as you see in this book for the chapter level headings with the font used for the rest of the headings and the content itself. They complement each other nicely:
Combining bold with non bold or italic with non-italic or bold non-italic … also creates very interesting combinations that work. For example: BoldCalibri. Bold with an italic of same font is very pretty.
Another effect I myself have used for a corporate logo in the past is the mixing of the same font, but its different weights together to make a single word. For example: the font Eras, comes in many weights as follows: Eras Bold – Eras Demi – Eras Medium – Eras Light.
Try this idea on for size … lets pretend your name is “WidgetWorld.” What if you were to represent it as follows:
It makes a very artistic looking logo that seems to fade off in the distance and is only made up of a combination of the same font family in different weights. Now, combining this particular font may not really work for your organization as it sets a very high tech mood. But consider playing around with fonts in your computer to see if you can come up with something you can show to a graphic artist to help him or her to understand your thinking.
There are a lot of considerations that a really good graphic designer can help you with and I highly recommend fitting them into your marketing budget … that is, of course, IF they can also design for sales.
NEXT TIME ...
Next time we'll talk about color selections, paper selections, and printing secrets to save money and still look like you have an identity created and maintained by the pro's!
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