Branding

There are many factors that go into getting the best color out of your brand. After a while, the colors you use become the brand as well. Let's look at Pepsi or Home Depot. Those brands are recognized by the colors - because they are consistent. Color also has psychological effects. Most casinos and restaurants are red or have lots of red accents (red makes you want things). Purple is a sign of sensuality, bisexuality, spirituality, creativity, wealth, royalty... All colors have some affect on us. Now, the first thing to tackle is the calibration of your monitor and making sure your Photoshop color settings are set to match. Adobe recommends using Adobe 1998. Your monitor should have some basic color calibration settings that can be adjusted. If you're on a Mac, (aside from being lucky) you can go into your system preferences and do a custom calibration if the Adobe 1998 isn't doin' it for ya. The closer you can get your monitor to "reality", the less work you will have to do. The second thing you have to do is learn to go by the numbers. If you are preparing an image that will be printed, you must…

One of my FAVORITE topics. :) Vector graphics are created with math as opposed to pixels like a bitmapped image. Pixels are heavy. Vector is very light. AND it's infinitely resizable. Your graphics will always be crisp at any size. With that said, your logo should always be created in a vector-based program (Illustrator, Freehand, Korel) - NOT Photoshop. When a logo is created in Photoshop, designers can forget that this brand will need to cross over other mediums in addition to the lo-res webpage they're creating it on. If they are mindful to use the vector shapes within Photoshop, that will help. But then you get into filters and such. There are things you can do in Photoshop that can't be done in Illustrator (yet). When a logo is created with these types of filters and treatments, the logo has trouble going to a larger size and has to be re-done to accomodate. In addition to this issue, you run into a busy logo. Simple graphics and easily read type are crucial. Consumers must have the same positive experience each time they come in contact with your logo, they must also have the same image of the logo reinforced…