Oliver Ker Design

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Branding by different suppliers

In my job I am constantly editing existing logos and pictures to make them more compatible so that they can be recognised at 20mm diameter as an enamel badge. This means I have to often alter the font size relationships and positioning or size of icons, In enamel badges this often can not be avoided!

My question is

Should we start changing images and logos because we think it’ll look better like this…

Let me explain

I’m sure we all get logos and graphics that have been produced either badly or just simply by the business owner in MS Word due to budgets etc, and then sourced companies for printing cards, banners, car graphics, flyers websites etc.

These are often separate companies for each product, so when the customer, lets call them Stuff Sold wants a banner producing, he supplies them with his logo which the banner company’s design team get hold of and can clearly see it needs a little bit of love and alters the logo a little bit so the banner starts to look more professional.

Stuff Sold then needs some vehicle graphics, so seeks out a company that can help. They also have a design department who have to alter the logo again, but this time have the banner artwork that was produced. They don’t have the font used on the banner but just use a serif font that looks similar.

You get Idea that every company that produces something for Stuff Sold might use a different font or something and this eventually builds up to a mix of different logos based on the same Idea.

Yes. It is going to cost more to hire a designer on top of the banner and car graphics printing which both companies offer free design with each order, but

  • is this more damaging having different logo versions on everything or
  • do customers care too much?
  • Does this depend on the size of the business?
  • Do ‘non-designers’ see the inconstancy?
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Comments

  1. # Gavin Elliott 150 days ago

    The company with the bad looking logo I doubt would mind having different versions. It takes a good businessman/woman to know what a strong brand can do.

    Customers would notice an inconsistency, but I guess it would only be 50% of the total customer based that would notice, the rest probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

    I don’t think a size of business matters in this case. Some of the largest companies in the world probably couldn’t give a monkeys about their company brand, like I said earlier you see big company with bad brands every day of the week and more often than not you drive behind their vehicles every day. It is weirdly something that I’ve become increasingly interested in over the past month or so, the fact that some businesses actually do not care about the visible brand.

    Non-designers probably do notice but it doesn’t matter to them, not half as much as ourselves where it utterly rubs us up the wrong way.

    I guess we will always have companies that just don’t care and hopefully we as designers can work with the better companies that do.

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