Here at fairly marvellous we’ve always appreciated the skills and talents of others. That’s why we work with copywriters, graphic designers, photographers… and don’t try to do it all ourselves.
File Formats
Vector formats, like Illustrator (.ai) and SVG are the holy grail. I can understand why tools like Canva charge extra for these formats – they need to differentiate their Pro and Free offerings – but I think it’s just plain wrong for a designer not to provide them.
Whether it’s for print, signwriting, making transparent, or just simply making it look good on the mobile view of a website – vectors are so much better.
If it really must be a raster, provide it at as high a resolution as possible, along with a transparent version for use on different backgrounds. If you’ve used software that supports layers (like Photoshop) provide the logo in a format where any text can be resized properly.
Whenever we’re provided with a JPG logo that could have easily been an SVG, it sets off alarm bells like “it’s stolen,” “they cheaped out,” or “they don’t know what they’re doing.”
Fonts
If your logo contains text, ensure your client knows which font you’ve used and where they can get it for themselves. This is important – if they want their website to match their brand, they will probably want to use the same font somewhere on it.
If you’ve used a “free” font from somewhere, make sure that font is free for commercial use. Most aren’t and your client won’t be happy if we tell them we cannot use it, or that it will cost them hundreds of pounds.
The same goes for using fonts that come with applications. Not all fonts packaged with Windows, Mac, or Office are available on every device. If you’re using Adobe, bear in mind that clients need their own license to use web fonts – they are not covered by yours nor ours.
A safe option is any font available on Google Fonts. Regardless of your views on Google (we host the fonts locally to avoid issues with performance, GDPR, and tin-foil hat wearers), with over 1,500 font families available, free for commercial use, it’s a great resource. So many online design tools support them and you can even download them and install them locally for use in Office etc.
If you’ve already come up with something and need to find a free yet similar alternative font, “The Definitive Guide to Free Fonts” from Typewolf is very useful.
Expectations
If your brand design brief includes putting together a website layout, unless your client’s budget will cover a pixel-perfect implementation, it may be that the tools being used won’t match your design perfectly.
Even more importantly, the web designer may know more about user experience, mobile responsiveness, accessibility, and optimising conversions.
Explain that your layout is a draft – we’re on the same team. We’ve built lots of sites that met a designer’s expectations perfectly. We’ve built quite a few that exceeded them.
Doing it yourself?
If you’re designing your own logo on something like Canva or Looka, or finding a designer somewhere like fiverr, bear in mind that the things listed above usually cost extra. If you’re going to be using your logo on your website, business cards, van, or wherever for years to come, it’s worth a little investment.
How can web designers keep logo and brand designers happy?
We promise to avoid the temptation to say “we’ll knock something up in Canva.”
Got some tips? Share them in the comments or get in touch.
Local to us and looking for more work? We might be able to refer business to you, so get in touch.