So I’ve designed a logo for my girlfriend, and its just a very simple black and white wordmark logo with a matching submark.
However, she wants to have one of these printed on her business cards but with gold foil.
My question is: Since her logo is just black and white and will be presented as such across all of her social media accounts and Etsy account, is it okay to print this logo in gold on a business card? Does it even make sense that this logo is only going to be gold on this business card? She only wants the logo, so there’s no other brand elements to really add, like there’s no brand patterns and no real color palette (at least not yet, i’m trying to convince her otherwise but she’s a die-hard minimalist if you couldn’t tell).
Or should we just consider redesigning the logo to incorporate gold so we could do these business cards with gold foil and have it all be consistent and avoid any confusion?
Anyways, I know this may be an obvious question but for whatever reason, we can’t land on a definite answer. I’m straight outta college and I’ve always been taught that logos and especially logo colors need to be consistent across all media- print or digital.
But now I’m wondering if it even matters in this case since it’s just black and white? And there’s no other brand colors established for it anyway? Is there even an issue here? Am I just paranoid and overthinking it? Are these too many questions? Lmk
All competently designed logos have a black-only (or single-color) version that receives blingy-er treatments in select applications. If seeing her logo in both black-only and gold foil versions (will they?) causes confusion in her market, then her market must be very easily confused.
Brand disciplines should be honored of course, but just look at some real world examples. It’s never a fair comparison to “small-time” brands, but the Nike swoosh is a great example of many branding principles and effects. Go into a Nike outlet store and count the sizes, colors, locations, and implications of that thing. On the footwear alone, you’ll find it in almost every (type of) color.
Nope. In fact, I’d say having your logo appear black-only in some applications, and in gold foil elsewhere is a relatively conservative but elegant approach. There are plenty of things you don’t do with a brand. Don’t go looking for more. It’s her brand; her instinct is part of it. Give that some berth.
Wrote this yesterday evening but this forum only lets me reply limited times as I am a new user:
IMO it would be ok to have it embossed in gold on the business cards, as they have to stick out or else people tend to throw them away. Usually your first contact with the possible client is through business cards. So they have to look very good. I wouldn’t recommend changing the logo to a gold effect as gradients tend to look bad in print. Usually there are different types of logos for different uses, so it would be perfectly ok for me, if there was a gold and a black version of it.
My favorite business card had a picture of my thumb on the corner so when I handed it to people the thumb would still be there. It also had a housefly with a nice shadow and a 3d television effect in the back (pseudo 3d not actual or Adobe Dimension).
I also had a business card that was very old school on front but ultra modern on the back. I’d hand the card with the appropriate face up, but the potential client could see that I had a range.
I just bumped up your status level, so that shouldn’t be a problem now.
It’s one of those situations where it’s important to know the rules in order to know when it’s OK to break them. Logos and branding benefit from consistency, but when slavish conformance to consistency gets in the way of doing something worthwhile, consistency can become counterproductive.
Here’s an example of that very thing that @iraszl just posted in another thread: Samsung's Folded Logo. It breaks all the rules about never messing around with a company’s logo, but it greatly benefited the company (Samsung) to do so.
