Design Your Logo in Black & White Now, Save Yourself a Headache Later

The logo is one of the most important design elements of your product labels. It immediately and clearly associates your products with your company’s brand. Perhaps you are thinking about designing or redesigning a new logo for your company or one of its product lines. If so, I highly recommend that you create your logo in black and white before adding color to it. And if you are hiring a graphic designer to create a logo for you, make sure that they provide you with a black and white version.

Now you may be asking yourself why I would recommend such a thing, being as I work for Lightning Labels. If you are familiar with our company, you probably know that our state-of-the-art digital printing technology enables us to produce custom labels with as many different colors as you can think of for the same price as a single color (or black and white). So why am I recommending that you create a black and white version of your logo upfront?

Because although you will most likely use a color logo for your product label designs, website, and printed marketing materials, there is going to come a time when your logo will be reproduced in black and white or a single color, whether or not you want it to be:

• A potential customer will open your email on their mobile phone in black and white, or look up your website on a monochrome screen.
• Your company will be bestowed a great honor, and the awards committee will present you with a huge trophy engraved with the company logo.
• You will realize that printing in-house documents in color is waste of money.
• You will need to send a fax. (Yes, they still exist.)
• You will want to advertise in a publication that only offers black and white.
• You will want to advertise in a publication that offers color ads but purchase black and white ones to save money.

I could go on, but I’m sure you get the idea by now.

If you, like many of our customers, do your own graphic design work, creating your logo in black and white first will allow you focus on the “bones” of the design, especially its typography. This will ensure that your logo will work with a greater number of different colors when you do add color to it or tweak its graphic elements. And a logo that works equally well in black and white is the mark of a quality logo. Think Apple. IBM. Volkswagen. Google.

So they next time your company designs a new logo or revamps an existing one, consider creating a black and white version first, and adding color at the end of the design process. It will at least save you a major headache down the road, and might end up saving you a lot of money as well.

Comments

[Alec Lynch]

Businesses should definitely get a black and white logo with their design. However, colour is an important part of a design - I'm not sure you should start with black and white but you should definitely get it done at the start. Many logos now use 3d effects (see Xerox), gradient (see Apple's logo) and shadows (see google). These effects use many colours to achieve gradient which has traditionally been a 'no-no' when creating a logo. However, these companies would also have black and white versions of their logo as a backpocket.

Alec Lynch
DesignBay
http://logo.designbay.com

[Joshua Davis]

I agree that a logo should always be designed in one color (with only positive and negative space) so that it can adapt to any media or medium.

I always start with black & white ;)

http://www.joshuardavis.com/2009/05/portfolio.html

[Christy Correll]

You're a smart man, Joshua! And it is most evident you agree with my post as your entire logo portfolio is in black and white :)

[logo design]

The good thing about your information is that it is explicit enough for students to grasp. Thanks for your efforts in spreading academic knowledge.