Save yourself money with the right logo.  By that I do not mean all of the marketing fluff that comes with trying to sell you logo design, or branding, or whatever other term is thrown out these days when it comes to a logo.  What I mean is how that logo or brand is delivered to you, the client.

The best example I can provide is when I was working on a project for a local company.  This project was one which involved sponsors who would email their logos to have included in the final piece.  Without fail, I ran into many issues, and as you might expect, I received just about every file type known to man, many of which were unusable.  For those that were somewhat usable, they still required work.  It took work to extract them from a format that could not be used.  In one case, I was provided a Word document as a hi-res logo.  When I explained the format that was needed, I was told that the company did not have that.  Yet I had seen uncountable advertisements (including billboards) for this company.  Someone, somewhere had to have it! The sad thing was that the hi-res files that others had to create never made their way back to the company.

So that meant more work. And what happens when your designer works?  Yup, you pay for it. And if you do not correct the problem at hand, you will continue to pay for it until it is fixed.

If you have a brand, you should have that brand saved digitally in a variety of popularly requested and used formats.  If your logo requires a specific typeface, you should have that handy as well.  Many designers (and I am guilty of this, too) will throw out file types when some clients might not necessarily know what they are referring to. Here are some of the more popular file types:

• EPS:  An EPS file is probably the most important one to have.  Since it is a vector file, it can be scaled large without sacrificing quality. With the EPS file, any designer could convert it to the format they need without spending any extra time in doing so.
• AI: The AI file is the native Adobe Illustrator file which contains editable and unflattened content.  This file, like the EPS file, can be scaled but also allows the designer to make changes.
• PSD: This is the native Adobe Photoshop file.  Similar to the AI file, it usually contains editable content.
• TIFF: A TIFF file is another type of flattened image.
• PDF: Depending on how your image was saved as a PDF, it could still contain vector data and a hi-res image could be used from it.

Formats to frustrate your designer:

• PUB: Microsoft Publisher files, while they do have uses, are not suited for hi-resolution printing.  So if your job is going to press and you have a Publisher file, it will have to be reworked.  A logo inside of a Publisher file may have to be recreated at hi-res.
• DOC: Microsoft Word documents are similar to Publisher.
• Web-sized: Typically, a GIF or JPG saved from the web, or for the web, are not easily used.

So what would I recommend?  Take a look at the files you have and create a brand pack containing an EPS, PSD, and PDF if you have them.  If you do not have any of these, it wouldn’t be a bad idea at all to have someone create this for you. If you have specific uses for your brand (i.e. It cannot be placed on a certain color background) then having that usage document handy, along with the logo files and typefaces will make your designer happy.

And with a happy designer, they are not spending extra time formatting your logo and actually working on your project.  That saves time.  That saves money.