Making Life Easier: Ready-To-Use Logo Designs

 

By Betty Kellen

The constant evolution of Graphic Design on the web has created new concepts and choices for the general customer, especially for those who do not have any experience with graphics software or designing.

Consumers are no longer bound to hire the services of qualified graphic designers for design services as there are now many resources for a customer to easily- and without any experience at all in design- create and start using a web site, logo design, corporate identity, stationery and many more design applications. This does not mean that the role and importance of the professional graphic designer has diminished or is diminished in importance, quite the contrary, as these advances in design resources are because of innovative and visionary designers and in the end nothing can compare to the services of a professional and expert graphic designer.

Among these new resources is the emergence and mainstream use of Ready-To-Use logo designs and with this article will focus on, analyze and objectively asses the use of the Ready-To-Use logo design and the effect it has had both on the consumer and market.

What is a Ready-To-Use logo design?

A Ready-To-Use logo design (also known as “Logo Template”) is a logo design which can be purchased as an existing logo design where the customer can easily modify the design to customize and personalize the logo design to match his business identity perfectly. A high quality Ready-To-Use logo design would allow the user to do all of the following to the logo design:

• Add a company, organization or any other text to the logo in any font style, color or size.
• Change the colors of the logo design without losing any of the special effects given to the logo design by the designer.
• Modify and adjust the logo design size to any size without losing any display or resolution quality.
• Modify or change the logo design in any way imaginable in order to personalize the logo to his needs completely.

Naturally, the emergence of Ready-To-Use logo designs was not without its fair share of doubt whether these logo designs truly did offer the user all the above mentioned flexibility. The simple fact is these logo designs do indeed offer all these options provided they are created properly with industry standard file formats which will be outlined later on in this article.

Having understood what a Ready-To-Use logo design is, it is important to understand where the concept of these logo designs originated from: The concept behind this category of logo designs is very much similar to the concept and design system of HTML web templates and it would very certainly be fair to assume that the concept of Ready-To-Use logo designs is a direct result and progeny of the HTML web templates. With the success and popularity of HTML web templates, it was only a matter of time when the same concept was applied on different design applications. In itself, the template concept is quite old and dates back to the early days of the emergence of desktop software. For example: Microsoft^® Word^© offers many types of templates for many word processing needs and applications.

What makes a “good” Ready-To-Use logo design?

This is a very important factor to consider when considering these logo designs because an improperly created Ready-To-Use logo design is nothing short of absolute waste of money and time, not to mention a source of great aggravation.

It is very easy to verify that a Ready-To-Use logo design is a good one, and as with anything else that can be purchased through a vendor, the golden and first rule is to make sure that the vendor is a well reputed, established business. There is a lot of piracy and sloppy work on the web, and always check to see if the site you are purchasing your logo design from is a registered company in its respective country and lists its legal and commercial identifications on its site (usually in Contact Us, About Us or Privacy pages).

Making sure that the logo design company is a legitimate one brings the client one step closer to verify that the design company has the capability to offer support and technical assistance if needed. It never hurts to check around to see testimonials and other indications of their high reputation.

Another important thing to check with Ready-To-Use logo design companies is to see if they hold the copyrights for the work displayed and offered for sale on their site(s). This would mean that the logo designs are indeed their creations and not pirated versions of other logo designs. This way the client can be sure, and also have the legal backing to use the logo design without any reservations. There are many ways to make sure that the site is the copyright holder, check for either Copyright numbers listed in the Terms of Use pages or look for special government issued seals displayed on their homepage. An example of a copyright badge is the USA issued seal:

Having established that the logo design company is a legitimate and highly reputed one, it is now important to ensure that the logo designs themselves are created properly in high quality and industry standard formats. As far as the actual “look” of the logo designs are concerned, that is totally dependent of the taste of the beholder so that is something that we will not discuss, but on the technical side of the matters, it is very important to verify that the specifications of the logo design include the following:

1. A full list of the file formats in which the logo design is supplied. In this case it is crucial that the logo design has supports the following formats:

·         Vector Format. A vector format file will ensure that the logo design is scalable to any size without losing any display or resolution quality. The logo design should look the same high quality whether it is used on a business card or a billboard.

·         Adobe Photoshop (*.psd) format. PSD files with full layers will allow the user to modify the logo design such as add text or company name, change the color or even change the core design without losing any of the special effects of the logo design.

2. If the logo design is created with custom fonts, then it is important to make sure that these custom fonts are included with the purchase in both Mac and PC formats.

If the Ready-To-Use logo design meets the above specifications, then the client can confidently purchase and use the logo design knowing that it is of high quality and the modification limits are endless.

In order to illustrate this point thoroughly, we will analyze a Ready-To-Use logo design and display what we can do with it and the extent we can modify and change it. We were able to obtain a sample Ready-To-Use logo design from the folks at Pixellogo (http://www.pixellogo.com) and we proceeded to work on the logo.

Figure 1:

The logo design in Figure 1 is the original Ready-To-Use logo design, supplied with .psd files and vector format files. The font used in this logo design is a system font called Arial available in both Macs and PC’s. Let’s list what we see in this logo design:

1. A circular logo design with the letter “e” in the middle.
2. The circular design is of two parts; an outer ring encompassing an inner circular design.
3. The letter “e” in the middle
4. Two lines of text underneath the logo design: “company” & “solutions”.

Now, as this logo is a Ready-To-Use, then we should be able to modify any part of it as we would like. We should be able to change the middle “e” to any other alphabet or even two letters or a full word. We should be able to change the color of any part of the logo whether it is the outer circular ring, inner circle, the middle letter “e” or the color of the text “Company Solutions”. We should also be able to change the text “Company Solutions” to any other text that we want as well as change the font, font size or just plainly remove it, so let’s proceed with some changes:

Figure 2:

As we can see in Figure 2, we have changed the logo design spectacularly and without any restrictions and it is now a completely different logo design. Note the following changes when compared to Figure 1:

1. The letter found in the middle of the circular design has changed to a “P” in capital letter from a small case “e”.
2. The color of the inner circular design has changed from grey to a shade of red.
3. The text “Company Solutions” has changed to “Printing Services” with the word “Printing” in different color from the original text color as well as in different, larger size and higher case.
4. The positioning of the text “Printing Services” is different from that of “Company solutions as shown in Figure 1.

The only thing that remains the same in both versions of the logo design is the outer ring which is of the same color but that is purely by choice as and it can also be changed to any color or removed altogether. For the above example we decided to keep it in its original color.

The above example is a perfect example of a good and high quality Ready-To-Use logo design. All that needs to be done now is stick it to a website, business card or anywhere else for that matter, and start its use. We further tested its scalability and the resolution and display quality was the same perfect quality when printed as small as 0.5”x0.5” or 8.5”x11”. This means that we can have the same quality when printed larger than our test size.

Are Ready-To-Use logos the future?

The correct declaration would be that Ready-To-Use logo designs are an established part of the future. Custom designed logos will always be a main part of the design industry and it will always remain an important demand by the market, but it is also fair to say that Ready-To-Use logo designs are now an equally important commodity in demand and supply in the business and personal market. This is because logo design is a matter greatly dependent on taste and style and there are potentially as many different tastes and styles as there are people in the world. So, even the largest Ready-To-Use logo design companies in the market today may be able to satisfy every logo design client. On the other hand, the categories in which Ready-To-Use logo designs are available among the better logo design companies are indeed truly impressive, covering any business or personal category.

Perhaps the greatest advantages that Ready-To-Use logo designs offer to the public are:

1. Immediate delivery.
2. Wide range of logo design categories to choose from.
3. Competitive prices.

In the case of immediate delivery, most online retailers of Ready-To-Use logo designs allow for prompt delivery of the logo designs through online delivery methods such as download links.

As for the categories of logo designs to choose from; clients can find a logo design in any category when visiting any well established and reputable Ready-To-Use logo design company.

Finally in the case of the competitive prices, clients may be able to purchase a Ready-To-Use logo design at prices starting from $ 35.00 USD to $ 300.00 USD, which when compared with custom logo costs are a bargain because custom logo prices can range anywhere from $ 400.00 USD to five figure amounts. It is important to note here that Ready-To-Use logo designs are usually sold with either one of two licenses: Exclusive and Non-Exclusive. When an exclusive logo design is purchased, the vendor then is immediately required to remove it from sale and relinquish all copyrights to the client. As for non-exclusive logo designs, they may be sold more than once but this does not necessarily mean that the same logo design is going to be everywhere out there in the world being used by different users. Quite the contrary, it is very unlikely that anybody would run into the same two logos simply because once purchased, the user of the non-exclusive logo will modify and personalize the logo design as seen in the example above and this will make sure that no two logo designs are alike.

As an active member of the industry and an avid follower of trends and progress, I believe that the introduction of Ready-To-Use logo designs is indeed a benefit to the design community and the market. The options available to the market have increased as well as the options available for graphic designers to work in different fields have increased dramatically in the fiercely competitive world of Graphic Design in general and logo design in particular. Exciting times are ahead of us in Graphic Design techniques and methods.

 

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