Picture this… you’ve just paid a friend to design a logo for you on Canva, then you decide to invest in a new website and suddenly your website design company says your logo is too small and not fit for purpose. Oops! This might mean you need to invest in branding services again to get it up to scratch and ready to roll out across all of your marketing materials. This is just one of many reasons we would advise to work with a branding or graphic design professional when designing your brand or logo.
This is certainly not a criticism of Canva, we love it! An excellent marketing tool, but perhaps not ideal for creating your brand from scratch as it can be limiting. Let us break down the importance of branding for you so you can get to grips with the bigger picture.
What is branding?
It’s much more than just a logo! A brand is an overall image that your customers, potential customers and team members will have of your business. It helps all of those people identify your business, company, product or services and it does take some time and research to get it absolutely right.
Outlining your brand puts you in control of the image you want people to see within the marketplace before they make up their own minds about you. Your brand consists of an identity that isn’t just visual but is deep-rooted into main purpose and culture of your business. Your brand should then be emulated through every little thing you do from how you approach customer service, to how it looks on staff uniforms and business cards.
It then becomes even more important to ensure that your brand touchpoints, like your logo, are of the correct size and file type. Nobody wants a pixelated logo on their website that’s really hard to see or it will give them the wrong impression about your professionalism.
Let us explain this further by delving into some of the different file types, so the next time you want to work with a marketing agency of any kind, you’ll have the knowledge (and the correct files) to hit the ground running. These are our top 5 to be aware of:
- PNG – Portable Network Graphics – ideal for anything online as they can be editable but not suitable for printing as they are low resolution.
- JPEG – Joint Photographic Experts Group – Probably one of the most common file types that you will be used to seeing. They are versatile but the quality of the file will increase or decrease depending on the file size. Pay particular attention to the resolution of the file in order to ensure a professional looking output.
- PDF – Portable Document Format – designed to be a file able to be viewed on any computer, also the best universal tool to view and edit a vector logo in PDF format if further manipulations are required.
- PSD – Photoshop Document – the most popular graphics editing software by graphic designers where files are created in layers making edits and resizing very possible.
- EPS – Encapsulated Postscript – a file in vector format resulting in high-resolution graphics for print. Ideal file type to share with a marketing agency who are working on branded materials for your business.
Should you ever come across some other file types, we’d be happy to help you make sense of them, or better still, if you’d like to work with a professional branding agency from the word ‘go’ then give us a call. Our unique approach and strategic outlook on branding will ensure your business is ready to go the distance rather than put up with a quick fix.
