Fact #1:  Try to keep the number of people who are involved in deciding upon your logo design as small as possible. Having multiple people giving multiple directions can significantly complicate the design process. If at all possible, try to limit the number of people directly involved decision to three. A "committee" type approval process could cause a stalemate in deciding upon a design.

Fact #2:  It is critical that your logo be in a format that you can use for all purposes. You need a design that can be used for business cards, letterhead, promotional items such as mugs, outdoor signs and the Internet. Low-resolution logo images in JPEG format will work fine for the Internet, but these cannot be used for professional printing.

You need the design in vector format (PDF, EPS, Adobe Illustrator), which draws in mathematical outlines that can be resized to any size and still look great. These are the default fie format that we provide.

Fact #3:  If you want a logo that has a human figure(s) integrated in the design, it is best to have the human forms in abstract format that are racially neutral and that do not explicitly represent any one racial ethnicity. Example: If a Korean-American who owns a day-care center in Los Angeles gets a new logo that shows three Asian children on it, this could send an incorrect message to people of non-Asian descent that this firm only deals with children from Asian backgrounds. Business could suffer as a result.

Fact #4:  If your logo needs to be printed on cardboard boxes, paper/plastic bags or if it has to be embroidered on a knit shirt, the logo design needs to be relatively simple. Consider the thick, coarse paper used in grocery bags. Getting a complex multi-color logo onto such a surface would be almost impossible. In your logo needs to be used for one or more of these purposes, the logo needs to be fairly simple in design and use one (two at most) colors.

Fact #5:  When you are viewing logo design proofs on your computer monitor, it's important to realize that the computer monitor will not exactly represent how the colors will look when the logo design is actually printed on business cards and other items like stationary. Color shifts are inevitable. Most of the times these shifts are insignificant, yet other times the color shifts can be huge...creating disappointing results and the possibility of having to reprint the items.

If you want to be absolutely, 100% sure about how the colors will look, go to your local print shop and ask for what is known as a Pantone Swatch Book. It's a system exactly like the color swatches you might see at a paint store. Simply find a color that you like and relay the particular Pantone color number to the designer and you're done. The color will print out exactly as you saw in the swatch book with no surprises.