About 19 years ago the company I worked for was bought by a much larger (Fortune 500) company. I needed to get a new sign made for the front of the office. I went to the local sign store and they had a CD with the artwork for hundreds of major companies, including my new parent company. I didn’t have to provide anything other than a verification of the Pantone colors.
When I had the original sign made for the much smaller company I did need to provide the artwork in a vector format. I just had the tech pubs department send me the file which I then took to the sign company. They also had a paper drawing with the logo defined in drafting style, with dimensions (lengths and radii) for all elements defined.
Large companies have very specific format, size, and usage policies and woe betide the employee who transgresses where it can be seen by the bosses.
Here’s a good example of how a fair sized company manages their logo. The IEEE is the equivalent of a company with $100-200 M in revenue, but is a non-profit and transparent, so they don’t have many private policies.
My favorite was the engineering firm (who should’ve known better): “So why can’t you just use the logo off our home page?”
(Umm, the logo that’s 100 pixels wide? And you want us to use that for the ten foot banner? That’s no longer Pixels Per Inch, it’s Inches Per Pixel) “Sorry, we’ll need the original art. Don’t you have a vector version, maybe an Adobe Illustrator file?”
“Waaal, that’d be Ed. Ed’s got all our artwork files.” “Oh, ok, can I get Ed’s email, then?” *“Waaal, he don’t work here.” *“???” “Yeah, he left a year ago, and we haven’t been able to find any of the stuff he was hanging onto.”
If all they have is a low-res bitmap from their home page, or something sketched on a crumpled napkin, then I’m sure they will be more than happy to pay top dollar for someone to carefully and accurately re-render it in a drawing program…
Way back in the mists of yesteryear, shortly after the dinosaurs left us, I set up my college’s first web server. I wanted a copy of their logo in several different sizes. Of course they didn’t have any gifs or anything useful.
Luckily, it was a simple design with all straight lines so I generated it in xfig (I told you it was a long time ago). Made versions in different sizes and colors. (Tried to match the school logo color as best I could.) Even made one with a nice speckled pattern.
Put them up on my web page. Soon others were copying them and putting them on their pages, etc. I assume that those images are still around somewhere. (Hmm, I better do an image search sometime.)
But I always knew that some admin people were anal about such stuff and worried that at some point there’d be a memo with specific “don’t do that” warnings. Nothing happened before I left.
Back in the 80s, I did computer graphics, and our biggest customer was GE.
GE had a book on the proper use of their logos, and were set so that those using it would be given photo-ready art to paste up.
That didn’t work when doing slideshows (these were actual slides, the type of thing that’s now done in PowerPoint). So I had to digitize the logo.
Usually, that’s not hard: you tape the image to a digitizer and tap on it. Sort of like tracing, only the computer drew the lines. The only issue was doing curves, which were complicated.
Of course, the GE logo was all curves. I spent a lot of time working on it to get the curves correct (I’d print out a copy and put it atop the original to see if it matches). Eventually, I got one that was acceptable and we used it in all our work for GE.
Then GE changed their logo.* With even more curves. So back to the digitizer.
*It was a very slight change and few people even noticed. See the change in 1986 in this image.
Which Pantone? Spot ink or process? Which process? Hexachrome, CMYK, CMYK-OGV? :eek: It’s amazing how the art people keep track of it at all.
Most likely, someone mis-converted Pantone spot to process and wrote it down on their whiteboard, at which time it became “official” and they kept specifying that wrong color over and over rather than referring to the original. Oops.
Designers like myself are very familiar with the “just use the one that’s on our website” problem.
My usual solution is to Google the company’s name and filetype:pdf. Usually that will turn up something that the company, if it’s big enough, has had another pro do and then put online: an annual report, employment application, payroll deduction form, company picnic notice, whatever. That can then be opened in Adobe Illustrator, and the logo “borrowed” from it. Unless, whoever did that document had to use a low-res jpeg instead of vector art.
