Designing a logo is both an art as well as a science, where along with creativity, typographic principals, color theory and studying industry standards and trends, even the best logo can lead to problems if the correct program is not utilized to create it. Various programs have been used for creating logos, some successfully while others with less success. Popular programs include, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. While there are some who feel that Photoshop is the best program for creating logos, seasoned professionals will often refute this fact based on certain aspects that are true to professional logo design.
Oftentimes, I'll receive calls from new clients that have a “logo” created by a sign company when they had their signage made or created by a webmaster for their website and now want printed items made using that “logo”. Unbeknown to them, they send me a Photoshop logo thinking this will suffice. This complicates things in several ways:
Clarity at any size
It is important to understand that Photoshop, as the name suggests, is best
for those aspects of designing that deal with photographs or other images. Photographs,
are bitmap images, which are characterized by millions of tiny pixels that,
together make up the whole photo with all it’s variances in color. The
main problem with using pixels or bitmap images is that they are not easy to
scale up or down in size, which is absolutely essential for creating usable
logos. When using Illustrator, a logo that was created only a few inches in
size, can easily and clearly scale to the size of a billboard, without any loss
of clarity whatsoever.
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| Raster Graphics Logo Designed using Photoshop |
Vector Graphics Logo Designed using Illustrator |
Raster vs. Vector - Vector is clearly the winner
Photoshop is a raster based program while Illustrator (Corel Draw and Freehand)
is a Vector based program. As mentioned above, raster based programs use bitmap
images, which also contributes to larger file sizes than a vector based graphic.
This again creates a problem with regard to resizing of images, which is absolutely
essential while creating logos. Vector images are composed of curves, lines
and points, and therefore can be easily re-sized and enhanced to produce a superior
quality and much smoother logo. These are basically points that are placed at
proportionate intervals and filled with a solid color and joined by a line or
Bezier curve, depending on the placement of points. This line or curve can be
easily re-sized and redone as it does not really depend on dimensions, unlike
raster graphics or images.
Built to be Versatile
It is important to note that the files created using vector based programs are
easier to go to print, which is not the case if you are using Photoshop or any
other raster based program for designing your logo. For example, if a 2 color
Pantone logo (very typical scenario) needs to be sent to a commercial printer
color separated by Pantone colors; this is a very complex task using Photoshop,
whereas with Illustrator, items can quickly be selected for output at the printers.
Vector images are easier to print, at any resolution that your printer can accommodate.
Lastly, you can actually create intricate designs using vector graphics, which is not possible using Photoshop or any raster based program. Vector graphics programs allow you to spin, stretch, mirror, tilt and shift the base points to create such sophisticated creations and designs, which is not possible using Photoshop. Therefore, most logo design experts strongly feel that if you want a professional logo, you should use a vector graphics program.
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