Your new logo is going to be the poster child for your client’s organization. It needs to be easy, breezy, beautiful.
What can you do to ensure that your logo file is immaculate and immune to an inconsistent appearance across the web and print? Implement a foolproof logo production process that’s what!
Tell me if you’ve experienced one of these production nightmares after you’ve sent your final logo to your client.
Hopefully, you’ve never experienced any of these horrors and have consistently produced impeccable logos. If however, you’ve made a mistake or two and had to shudder in solitary embarrassment as you discover the logo equivalent of a massive forehead pimple on the artwork your client has been using for months, then you may want to implement a production process.
Here’s a breakdown of the steps I take, the problems these steps help you avoid, and how to execute them.
First thing’s first. Is your file even set up for the color space you’re working in? If your logo is using a CMYK mix or Pantone, then the Document Color Mode should be CMYK. If you’re working with RGB colors or Hex values, the Document Color Mode must be RGB.
Document Color Mode affects blacks.
If your black is meant to be 100%K, but the mode is RGB, black will appear to be a very dark gray instead of a pure black. Inversely RGB black in the CMYK color mode will appear as a pure black, but the color mix will add cyan, yellow, and magenta as well and apply more ink to your black than is necessary.
Incorrect color mixes
Converting between color modes in Illustrator WILL affect the color mixes. Your RGB values will change when opened in CMYK mode and vice versa. If you want color precision, applying the correct Document Color Mode is vital.
Checking the document color mode is simple. Just look at the document tab. It displays the document name and color mode.
Changing the color mode is also easy. Select File > Document Color Mode.
This step is a followup to step one. Just make sure that your color mixes are appropriate for the color mode you’re in. Unless you are using a specific rich black mix for your logo, blacks should have the following values.
If the correct blacks aren’t applied to a logo, digital logos will appear lighter than they should be and print logos will be using more ink than they need to.
Double click on the black swatch and manually change the values if they are incorrect. If the black swatch needs adjusting, make sure to reapply the adjusted black swatch to all of the black shapes in your logo.
Overprinting becomes an issue when shapes overlap. If overprinting is enabled, underlying shapes may show through instead of being knocked out — this is rarely, if ever, a desirable effect for a logo.
Overlapping shapes can be affected by underlying shapes causing color distortion.
Select all artwork (Command + A). Go to Window > Attributes. Make sure that both Overprint Fill and Overprint Stroke checkboxes are unchecked or grayed out. If the boxes are checked just click them until they are unchecked. As long as all of your artwork was selected, this will ensure none of the artwork is set to overprint.
Global swatches are regular swatches on steroids. The difference between global swatches and regular swatches is that when global swatches are applied to multiple shapes, the color of all those shapes can be adjusted by changing the global swatch. Regular swatches do not have this functionality.
If you don’t create global swatches, you’ll be forced to manually update every shape that contains an instance of the color.
Double click on a swatch in the swatch panel and select the checkbox that says Global. After you do this, a white triangle will appear in the lower right corner of the swatch thumbnail.
Illustrator typically opens with a ton of unnecessary swatches. Your document will be cleaner without them.
If you ever need to edit your logo file in the future, you could accidentally pick one of the default swatches by accident. At the very least these swatches are annoying clutter.
Click the Swatch panel flyout menu and choose “Select All Unused.” Then click the trash icon in the bottom right of the swatches panel.
This step is definitely subjective. It is easier to isolate and work on separate components of your logo if each component has its own layer. Components are things like icons, marks, type, tagline, etc.
There’s no problem with keeping all your logo components on one layer. It’s just easier to select an entire component if it is on a dedicated layer.
Create a new layer by clicking the layer icon in the bottom right corner of the layers panel. Select the artwork you want to put on the new layer. Cut the artwork (Command or Control + x). Select the layer you want to move the artwork to from the layers panel. Paste the artwork in place (Shift + Command or Control + v).
Text layers by default are editable. You can type into them, delete characters, change type size, etc. Text can also be converted to shapes, which is very beneficial for logo production.
Missing fonts. Not everyone who uses your logo file is guaranteed to have the same font as the one you created the logo with. If someone opens your logo file without having the correct font, a default font will be used to replace the font you agonized over selecting when you designed the logo. Converting the text to outlines makes the fonts into shapes, just like a rectangle or oval, which are not dependent on a font file to be rendered correctly.
Select any and all type in your design and then select Type > Create Outlines (Shift + Command or Control + o).
“Expand Appearance” and “Expand” are ostensibly the same thing, but there are subtle differences. Expand appearance separates multiple strokes, fills, or effects that have been applied to an object or group via the Appearance panel. When you use Expand Appearance, strokes will remain strokes. Expand takes an object’s appearance and converts it into a shape. Effects such as warping that may have been applied to the shape before expansion will retain their appearance but will no longer be edited nondestructively.
The problems with logos that contain objects which are not expanded relate primarily to strokes. If someone tries to scale your logo that uses strokes, the strokes will often maintain their set thickness (1pt for example) instead of scaling proportionately. This is a big problem for logo consistency, and may also cause problems when placing the logo file into other design applications.
Select any shapes with strokes, then select Object > Expand. Make sure stroke is checked. If the Expand option is grayed out, you will need to use Expand Appearance first, then Expand.
Logos are frequently made by combining multiple shapes. The results of expanding will also leave you with a plethora of shape objects. You can consolidate these objects by merging them into one unified shape instead of several grouped or overlapping shapes.
Editing difficulties
Trying to recolor or update your logo can be a major hassle if the logo components are comprised of dozens of little shapes. Unifying them means you’ll only have to select one object in the event you need to modify your logo’s color.
Large SVG files.
The fewer anchor points, the better when it comes to exporting SVGs. Combing shapes will drastically lessen the complexity of your logo file.
Select all of the shapes related to a specific component of the logo. Make sure our Pathfinder panel is open. Choose the “Unite” option under shape modes.
It’s important to note that if two shapes with different colors are merged, the resulting shape will be converted to only one of the two colors. Only merge shapes if they are the same color.
There is a nifty little command that will clean up stray points, unpainted objects, and empty text paths. These things can be extremely annoying and cause lots of frustrations. Get rid of ‘em!
Stray points and miscellaneous clutter are annoying at best and at their worst can cause production problems such as missing fonts or affect file dimensions.
Select all of your artwork by using Select All (Command or Control + a). Choose Object > Path > Clean Up. Make sure all checkboxes are checked. If there is nothing to clean up in your file, Illustrator will display a prompt telling you there was nothing to clean up.
The exact zoom percentage doesn’t really matter all that much, the point is to zoom in extremely close to your artwork to check for odd protrusions or janky path joins.
Small imperfections become glaring eyesores at large sizes. You don’t want to be the person being roasted on the internet for the deformed logo you designed.
I know you know how to zoom, but one lesser-known trick is that you can enter a custom zoom level in the field at the bottom left of your window.
You’re almost there. This is the last step. Artboards can be automatically resized to fit the dimensions of the artwork they contain using “Fit to Artwork Bounds.”
Any designer who needs to place your logo into InDesign or other design software is going to hate you if they have to crop in on your logo once it’s placed. Fitting the Artboard to your logo ensures that it will always be the correct crop wherever it is used.
If you only have one artboard and one logo in your file then you can merely select Object > Artboards > Fit to Artwork Bounds. If you have multiple logos on different artboards, you’ll need to select one logo first and then choose Object > Artboards > Fit to Selected Art.
While in artboard editing mode, you can select an artboard and then double click on any individual shape or group of shapes to fit the artboard to that object.
It’s always a good idea to lock your layers before sending your logo files to a client.
Clients or other designers can and will mess with your artwork. Locking the artwork makes it just a little bit more difficult for them to do so.
Click the empty square to the right of the visibility icon (eyeball) on the layer in the Layers panel.
There you have it, my friends. Follow these steps, and your logo file is guaranteed to be the bell of the ball.
…but exporting the zillions of color schemes and file formats your client needs is super boring and a general pain in the ass. That’s why The Logo Package has created Logo Package Express. It’s an extension for Adobe Illustrator that can create, export, and sort hundreds of logo files in minutes. Learn more about it.
