The Pacific Sky Logo
Like anything that doesn’t really exist, logos are tricky things to pin down.
What I mean by that is this: a logo is an idea. It’s not ink, it’s not light coming out of pixels. It’s just an idea shared by a group of people with a common cause. It doesn’t have a physical existence until it’s made to have one. And the instant that it starts to exist, it exists in a context. Kind of like “no man is an island.” (except for Paul Simon, who is also a rock)
This context is significant because it affects how the logo is perceived. Let’s say the context is a square spot in a newspaper grid. If you have a narrow logo, it will either be smashed or too small once it’s put in contact. Let’s say the context is a dark background. If your logo has black text, you probably won’t be able to see it.
So, one thing a logo designer needs to keep in mind is its context.
Obviously, it’s going to be hard to design a logo that fits every context. Nigh impossible. So what the maintainer of a logo has to do is curate variations. Without curated variations, it’s likely that people using the logo will create their own willy-nilly. Eventually this leads to the logo’s audience becoming confused as to what actually represents the brand. In a worst-case scenario, the logo becomes unrecognizable.
These curated variations are tightly controlled so that while they vary from the original logo, they still represent the beliefs and symbolism of that logo.
When Pacific Sky first set out to create its logo, it was developed based on some guiding principles: “Deliver positive impact,” “the professionals,” “quality,” and “authority.” Visually speaking, it conveyed strong geometry and a bold presence with tones reminiscent of the brand’s namesake.
That resulted in the following logo, give or take a few modifications:
Great. Now a few questions.
Size Contexts
What if this logo is on a dark background?
What if we don’t want the tagline?
What if it’s put in a square like most social media sites?
Adapting an existing logo for all three of these contexts results in some weird, poor designs.
Now, we’re a marketing company so this is especially-important for our logo. However, a poor logo reflects poorly on whatever company it represents.
What we don’t want is for the designer du jour to chop and fill a logo to make it fit. We want to provide that designer with a pre-considered application of the logo that meets their needs.
Sometimes we have to change up the colors, but we stay within the parameters of the brand:
Sometimes we have to change up the sizing:
And sometimes, we even have to modify the brand even more. In this case, people had already started to call the company PacSky, so it was a natural choice for a square variation. Additionally, square logos are most-often used on social media where the brand’s full name will also appear. That way, even if someone doesn’t know the company’s name, they will start to associate “Pac Sky” and its colors with the name of the company.
So, now we have a few variations that can conceivably be used in any size. But there are still more considerations.
Color Contexts
In addition to the possibility of the logo being placed on a dark background, there is another color consideration to keep in mind.
It’s easy to think about colors: blue, cyan, whatever. Color exists naturally. But when you want to create a specific color, say the Pacific Sky Blue, how do you consistently do that? In ye olden days, painters didn’t have much choice — they used whatever natural pigments were available. Any blue passed for blue. But today, a brand’s color conveys certain nuances that differentiate it from other brands using a similar color.
When creating a color on the screen, that color is created by light. We call this additive color, because the computer screen adds varying amounts of red, green, and blue light to match the color. An unpowered screen is black. All three diodes shining at full intensity looks like white light.
When creating a color with ink, the printer adds varying amounts of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK ink to match the color. A blank page is white. A page covered in ink is black.
What this means for a logo designer is that achieving a uniform color across media requires careful selection in each color model. When we first chose our blue, it looked totally different on screen compared to paper. That was because we had chosen a hex code, which is a way of representing colors for the web (the Twitter blue for example is #1da1f2). When we printed that, the printer did its best job of translating that into ink, but it wasn’t perfect.
Now, we have a different set of colors for print and screen. For our two primary colors we also have Pantone colors specified, which ensure even more accurate color reproduction in print. Here’s a page from our style guide:
As you can see, we have implementations specified for not only our primary colors, but also for our family of accent colors which add life and variety to our brand.
Making it All Available
As you can see above, we have an internal style guide that helps us make decisions about how to place our logo, which colors to use, and a handful of other things like which typefaces and so on. This guide is useful when we’re designing new media like brochures, rack cards, business cards, etc. Here’s a few pages from a style guide we created for a client:
But what about, for instance, a newspaper ad for an event we’re sponsoring? We won’t be designing that even though we may know in advance what the ad looks like. In the absence of an official design, many designers will just go to the company’s website and download the logo from the header. Sometimes this works; sometimes it results in stretched or otherwise distorted logos. What we would like to do is to provide the designers with a limited set of resources: enough to represent our brand well, but not so many that they can go and create their own logo variations. Many big brands (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn) create a website for their brand, specifying where which logos can be used, and to create downloads for those assets.
We’ve created a similar site. Right now it’s fairly limited but it provides all the possible permutations of our logo: for dark or light contexts, with or without tagline, horizontal or square aspect ratios, and all in the three most common file formats (there’s a way to download a PDF; I’ll let the more technically-inclined of you figure out that one). This means that we have access to a consistent representation of our company’s logo at any time, and we can send variations to people who may be using our logo. For instance, if we wanted to send the dark, tagline-less variation to someone for print, we could send them this self-explanatory link: https://pacificsky.co/logo?variant=dark&tagline=yes (technical aside: the SVG contains CMYK color values as well as RGB)
We also use these images in our email signatures as well as the bottom of sites that we design. That way, if we decide the logo needs tweaking, we can make the changes once online, and everywhere that logo is used, it will be changed.
