You’re in a meeting discussing the need for a new brochure and redesigning your company logo, when George (from accounting) offers to create the logo for FREE. Everyone’s excited that the project can be done in-house and you’ll save tons of money because it’s free.
Sounds like a great idea right?
Wrong. Nothing comes for free. Free is costly and free can be damaging.
You may not know how much revenue is lost if a design is done poorly. But if you miss the mark with your customers, you will lose business. Maybe a lot of business!
Do you have someone on staff that can design a logo for free? What does that mean anyway?
Doesn’t it mean they are going to stop doing the job you are paying them to do to dabble in design?
Doesn’t it also mean that if they were a great designer, they probably wouldn’t be working for you in accounting?
Even if your billing representative artist comes up with a new design, they may not understand the file formats needed for various projects.
An incorrect logo file format might be:
- Rejected by a printer
- Incompatible with different computers
- Painfully slow to download
- Reproduce with terrible results
Be sure your designer can do more than sketch something fresh. If the designer happens to be your boss’s sister, you’ll want to approach this gently.
Professional printers will typically ask that the artwork be created as an .eps file.
Experienced designers know exactly which file type to use.
Asking your designer to provide the final artwork as an .eps file might be all you need to do to avoid a lot of pain and money lost later.