At the outset of working with a charity I ask for their logo and often find it’s unsuitable for use on their website. It’s not uncommon to find the logo’s only half an inch high when printed and fuzzy round the edges. Some logos are emailed to me embedded in a Word document – not a proper image format. I once received a logo in the post. No, not on a CD, on paper. Presumably the sender thought I could scan it in and that would be good enough.
This request is mainly for smaller charities, many of which don’t have decent quality logos. Please get your logo fixed. Not it won’t just benefit your website but also your signage, your newsletter and any other kind of publicity. Unless you have a talented volunteer graphic designer handy, there will be a cost – but it’s worth it.
- Your logo should be prepared by a graphic designer (not a kid doing a school project).
- It must legible in both colour and black and white. Try it out in different colours.
- It should look good whether displayed really small on a website or huge on a signboard.
- How small? How about 16 pixels high and 16 pixels wide.
- Logos that incorporate more than a few words of text into the design rarely work well but your logo should look good when placed near other text. By the way, does your charity have an effective tagline?
- Your logo should be designed in a vector format to allow it to be scaled up or down with no loss of quality.
- The best logos are very simple.
Smashing Magazine has an article on the 10 Common Mistakes in Logo Design that you should read and more recently they’ve published Vital Tips for Effective Logo Design.
I remember the logo a charity used that i used to work for, it looked like someone had doodled it on a lunch break, so i can sympathize with your request!