Hi everyone!
I have been asked quite a few times in recent months, how do I hire a good logo designer? My standard answer is...you hire me! But there is more to it than just taking someone's word that they will do a good job for you. They may have a plethora of experience or their portfolio may look outstanding, but if they don't have the total package, can they really do your company justice? Read below and judge for yourself.
The following is my very first blog post and it's just as relevant today as it was in 2009 when I first posted it.
Thanks,
Michael
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Good Logo Design
In the years I have been in the advertising and design business, I have seen hundreds of logos. Some of them very good and some very bad; there’s an obvious difference between the two. The good ones define the company and support the brand. The bad ones don’t.
It sounds simple, doesn’t it? It’s not.
Good logo design is more than having your company name in a cool type font, or maybe a nifty little graphic illustration. A good logo designer starts off with research.
If you hire someone to design your logo and they don’t ask any questions about your company, run for your life.
When designing a logo, a designer should find out as much about your business as he or she can. It is not unusual for the designer to ask in depth about your business plan, marketing plan, and your product or service. Sometimes, this seems like the designer is digging into your privacy, but it is important to have as much information as possible so the design can work best for your company. After all, the designer is creating the visual identity that defines it.
Think about it, THE VISUAL IDENTITY THAT DEFINES YOUR COMPANY. That’s pretty strong stuff. The logo is the first thing most people see before they even meet you. It’s on your stationery, business cards, note pads, envelopes, products (if you sell a product), store fronts, and the list goes on and on.
Your logo often introduces your company to your customers. Now ask yourself, do you want someone who doesn’t want to know information about your business goals and aspirations to design the image that represents your company to your customers and potential customers? Or do you want a designer who cares enough to ask the right questions and provides you with a well researched and thought out design?
Along with a business plan and marketing plan, logo design should be one of the top three things you do when you start a business.
Steps that should be taken when designing your company logo.
• Initial meeting – An introduction and chance to meet the personality behind the business. It is important to meet the principals in the business because their personalities can help to define the parameters of the design.
• Research - Research is one of the most important, and most often ignored, parts of the logo design process. The designer needs to find out as much information about your business as he or she can. There is no such thing as too much information. The design firm should know almost as much about your business as you do. Research also includes doing copyright and trademark searches. This search should be done by a copyright and trademark attorney. If you don’t have an attorney, the designer should be able to provide you with a name (if the designer can’t give you a name you should worry, they should have someone that they use regularly). This trademark search is for the safety of your business. The search makes sure that no one else is using your name or mark. Finding out this information is extremely important because you don’t want to spend your hard-earned money on a logo design, thousands of dollars on corporate identity packages and signage, only to find out that some other business has the same business name and similar logo design and that they had it first, forcing you to spend more time and money re-designing and re-implementing your logo. Some companies spend over a million dollars a year just defending their trademark, so research is important.
• Design - The designers will sit down and go over all the information they have accumulated from the meetings and research, and start to come up with ideas. Designers don’t just start picking typefaces and drawing illustrations with no direction or purpose. A good designer will have a good reason for every part of a logo design. Designers are problem solvers and should provide several different designs for you to look at.
• Client input - After providing you with several designs, the designer will ask for your input. He or she will find out what you like and don’t like about the logo designs presented. This is a process that will help fine-tune the design and provide you with the logo that fits your business best.
• Final artwork - After all the research and meetings, it all comes down to the implementation of the final logo design. It is uniquely yours and will be tailored to your business.
Once you have a good logo design in place, it will make the branding and marketing of your business much more effective.
Logo designs are not inexpensive. A good logo design takes time. With the proper research and input from the client, the logo design will be some of the best money you spend. If you want to know how good logo design instantly identifies your business, think of these business names and see what pops into your head when you read them. McDonald’s™, Dodge™, HR Block™, Starbucks™, Best Buy™. These are the types of identifiable logo designs that are well thought out, researched, implemented, and effective, and none of these companies cut costs on their corporate identity design, and spend a lot of money pursuing people who infringe on their identity.
Finally, a good, extensively researched and designed logo supports your brand and makes your company immediately identifiable to your customers and potential customers. It also makes more effective implementation of all marketing materials. A well designed, professional logo is the public face of your business. It represents your company in all aspects of your daily business; the design should be solid, researched, immediately identifiable and knock their socks off!
© copyright 2014 Michael Burke
Showing posts with label printing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label printing. Show all posts
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Friday, May 14, 2010
Image resolution, the pain in my...brain!
I've been a Graphic Designer for around 20 years and this week I heard a term that I hadn't come across before (at least not that I remember). Samples per inch (SPI) the term came from a communication with a British publication I was sending a cover image for their magazine.
DPI, PPI, SPI; could image resolution be any more complicated. For those who don't know, DPI stands for Dots-per-inch, PPI, pixels-per-inch and SPI Samples-per-inch.
I'm not vain enough to think I know everything in my industry, but I know quite a bit and I had never heard of SPI before, so I did what anyone would do, I looked it up on the internet. I found the following definition on Wikipeadia.
Samples per inch (SPI) is a measurement of the resolution of an image scanner, in particular the number of individual samples that are taken in the space of one linear inch. It is sometimes misreferred to as dots per inch, though that term more accurately refers to printing resolution. Generally, the greater the SPI of a scanner, the more detailed its reproduction of the scanned object.
Typical consumer-level flatbed scanners are capable of optical resolution ranging from 100 to 2400 SPI; high-end scanners may have an optical resolution of 4800 SPI or more. Many scanners use interpolation techniques to achieve a higher effective SPI rating, with some manufacturers offering nearly one million SPI, though the quality is primarily limited by the optical resolution; interpolated SPI does not provide additional pixels in the scanned image.
Horizontal and vertical SPI ratings may differ for a given scanner; typical flatbed scanners use a horizontal array of sensors that are passed across the bed using an electric stepper motor. The density of the array of sensors determines the horizontal scanning resolution, while the minimum step size of the motor determines the vertical resolution. Similar characteristics are present in drum scanners, which continuously spin the item being scanned past the sensor array for numerous imaging passes.
To calculate the number of raw data bytes that a scanned image will take up, you can use the follow formula :
Where : vSPI is the vertical SPI hSPI is the horizontal SPI (can be considered the same as vSPI if not specified specifically) area is the squared area of the scanned document in inches²
color depth encoding is the number of bits used to encode a given amount of color information (256 colors=8; 65'536 colors=16; 16million colors=24)
Remember that this will give raw data bytes, images are almost always compressed when saved to disk using lossless (like PNG, TIFF) or lossy image formats (like JPEG).
That is understandable to me, but not to most people, and most of the scanners that I've owned don't have the SPI measurement at all. Most have DPI but that isn't the same as SPI.
DPI stands for dots-per-inch. This is primarily a printing term standing for the number of halftone dots within an inch. The more DPI you have, such as 300 dpi, the better quality of image you have on the printed page. Most scanners have this measurement when you scan in an image.
PPI stands for Pixels-Per-Inch. PPI is the screen resolution or resolution you see on your monitor. In general PPI and DPI are used interchangeably although they don't mean the same thing. 300 ppi is close enough 300 dpi so it makes little difference when scanning. If you notice your scanner probably says dpi and when looking at it in Photoshop it shows ppi. When creating an image for the internet 72 ppi is generally the accepted measurement.
I explain all this to my students and they look at me like I just grew horns out of the top of my head. To make it more difficult for them to understand, the resolution you are using needs to be the dpi, ppi. spi at the size you will be using the image. For example, if you have a space in your brochure that is 4 inches wide, you need your image to be 300 dpi, ppi at 4 inches wide. If you are putting an image on the web at 600 pixels wide then you need your image to be around 72 ppi, dpi at 600 pixels wide.
Onscreen graphics don't need to be as hi-resolution as graphics that are going to print. This is the reason you can't get a great quality print from an image that is optimized for the web.
The rule-of-thumb I teach is, you can always scale something smaller but you shouldn't scale bigger than the original resolution, if you do you will lose image quality.
As far as Samples per inch goes, I'm doing what I always done. Scan or shoot my digital images at the ppi or dpi that I need, and not worry about SPI until someone brings it up again.
©2010 Michael Burke
DPI, PPI, SPI; could image resolution be any more complicated. For those who don't know, DPI stands for Dots-per-inch, PPI, pixels-per-inch and SPI Samples-per-inch.
I'm not vain enough to think I know everything in my industry, but I know quite a bit and I had never heard of SPI before, so I did what anyone would do, I looked it up on the internet. I found the following definition on Wikipeadia.
Samples per inch (SPI) is a measurement of the resolution of an image scanner, in particular the number of individual samples that are taken in the space of one linear inch. It is sometimes misreferred to as dots per inch, though that term more accurately refers to printing resolution. Generally, the greater the SPI of a scanner, the more detailed its reproduction of the scanned object.
Typical consumer-level flatbed scanners are capable of optical resolution ranging from 100 to 2400 SPI; high-end scanners may have an optical resolution of 4800 SPI or more. Many scanners use interpolation techniques to achieve a higher effective SPI rating, with some manufacturers offering nearly one million SPI, though the quality is primarily limited by the optical resolution; interpolated SPI does not provide additional pixels in the scanned image.
Horizontal and vertical SPI ratings may differ for a given scanner; typical flatbed scanners use a horizontal array of sensors that are passed across the bed using an electric stepper motor. The density of the array of sensors determines the horizontal scanning resolution, while the minimum step size of the motor determines the vertical resolution. Similar characteristics are present in drum scanners, which continuously spin the item being scanned past the sensor array for numerous imaging passes.
To calculate the number of raw data bytes that a scanned image will take up, you can use the follow formula :
Where : vSPI is the vertical SPI hSPI is the horizontal SPI (can be considered the same as vSPI if not specified specifically) area is the squared area of the scanned document in inches²
color depth encoding is the number of bits used to encode a given amount of color information (256 colors=8; 65'536 colors=16; 16million colors=24)
Remember that this will give raw data bytes, images are almost always compressed when saved to disk using lossless (like PNG, TIFF) or lossy image formats (like JPEG).
That is understandable to me, but not to most people, and most of the scanners that I've owned don't have the SPI measurement at all. Most have DPI but that isn't the same as SPI.
DPI stands for dots-per-inch. This is primarily a printing term standing for the number of halftone dots within an inch. The more DPI you have, such as 300 dpi, the better quality of image you have on the printed page. Most scanners have this measurement when you scan in an image.
PPI stands for Pixels-Per-Inch. PPI is the screen resolution or resolution you see on your monitor. In general PPI and DPI are used interchangeably although they don't mean the same thing. 300 ppi is close enough 300 dpi so it makes little difference when scanning. If you notice your scanner probably says dpi and when looking at it in Photoshop it shows ppi. When creating an image for the internet 72 ppi is generally the accepted measurement.
I explain all this to my students and they look at me like I just grew horns out of the top of my head. To make it more difficult for them to understand, the resolution you are using needs to be the dpi, ppi. spi at the size you will be using the image. For example, if you have a space in your brochure that is 4 inches wide, you need your image to be 300 dpi, ppi at 4 inches wide. If you are putting an image on the web at 600 pixels wide then you need your image to be around 72 ppi, dpi at 600 pixels wide.
Onscreen graphics don't need to be as hi-resolution as graphics that are going to print. This is the reason you can't get a great quality print from an image that is optimized for the web.
The rule-of-thumb I teach is, you can always scale something smaller but you shouldn't scale bigger than the original resolution, if you do you will lose image quality.
As far as Samples per inch goes, I'm doing what I always done. Scan or shoot my digital images at the ppi or dpi that I need, and not worry about SPI until someone brings it up again.
©2010 Michael Burke
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