A marque or symbol which represents a company or organisation. The logo is often the first representative element of an organisation and therefore must clearly communicate the brand values. The logo is, perhaps, the most important communication piece of any organisation.
A brand is more than a logo, it is the full customer experience. The brand encompasses all aspects of a companies behaviour and the experience it’s customers have with it. This covers everything from the look and feel of it’s marketing material to how it’s staff answer the phone.
Aspects of a product or service that customers use to make judgments about the organisation. These can be physical entities such as the style of photography or non tangible, for example, tone of voice.
Person or person(s) who understand all elements of the brand and protect it’s usage.
The advantages of a brand. These can cover various aspects such as recognition, image, customer experience, association. A brand can have both positive and negative equity.
A set of rules which inform how a brand should communicate. Brand guidelines can cover anything from position of logo on material and colour palette to style of photography and templates for marketing material. Brand guidelines can vary from simple documents to extensive reference material which covers all aspects of communication.
Brand image is how an organisation is perceived by customers and potential customers.
The amount a customer remains loyal to a brand, continuing to purchase or use its services.
The key brand traits which set it apart from its competitors. The personality is the manner of a brand which customers relate to.
The way an organisation talks to its customers. This can be through written copy to the way staff deal with customers. Even the style of photography and colour palette can influence a companies tone of voice.
A short statement which sets out an organisations goals, beliefs and ambitions.
A short statement, often seen with the logo, which reflects the nature of the business and it’s goal. The strapline can help to clearly position a business within the market place.
Negative space is anything but negative. Used cleverly it can help to balance to the design and communicate key messages. A common mistake is to see blank space and fill it. What is often left is a confused message.
The space between lines of text.
The space between individual letters.
A single word left at the end of a paragraph. This is generally seen as bad typography.
RGB stands for Red, Green & Blue. When designing for the Internet or on screen, RGB is the colour palette that is generally used. Some desktop colour printers such as ink jet & colour laser printers are designed to interpret RGB colour, and translate it into ink on a page.
CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (black). When designing for print, CMYK is the colour palette that is generally used. CMYK is also known as ‘4 colour process’ or ‘full colour’. Generally, all commercially printed material is printed in CMYK, unless spot colours or specials are used.
A Spot colour, is a specific colour, usually a Pantone colour that is mixed to specifications and printed by running it through the press just the one time. Stationery is usually printed in spot colour as it is often the case that a company logo only uses 1 or 2 colours. For example our corporate colour is Pantone 185.
Spot colours also have a CMYK split. This is the percentage of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key (black) ink needed to reproduce the pantone colour. However, this split often produces a slightly different colour to the Spot colour. Oranges are particularly bad for this.
Spot colours will achieve consistency across a variety of printed material. They are also cost effective for 1 or two colour jobs. CMYK (or process) printing is required when printing full colour images. You can also print CMYK with an extra spot colour. However, this can increase costs.
These can include anything from metallic inks to lamination or UV Varnish.
This stands for Dots per inch and relates to the resolution of images. As standard, the resolution for printing images needs to be 300 dpi, or high resolution. A common mistake when images are supplied by clients is the resolution is 300 dpi but the physical size of the image is very small.
For example an image is 300 dpi and 10 cm x 10 cm. If that image is blown up to be used at 30 cm x 30 cm in a brochure, then the resolution will 100 dpi. The quality of the image will be too bad to print.
Resolution for screen only needs to be 72 dpi.
It is always best to supply logo artwork as an (illustrator) eps file. This will usually mean that it is a ‘vector’ based file and will print at a perfect quality at any size.