Your logo is often the first impression.

A great start

When you are starting a new business or considering rebranding with a new look, the first item on the list is usually a logo. A logo is something that speaks to us, it symbolizes our goals and makes the idea begin to feel like reality. For our customers our logo represents us. Its a way for them to recognize us, to stand out from the crowd. It is the "nice suit and shoes" for our business, and it is also what represents us when we are not around to do it ourselves. Customers can encounter our print ads, billboards, websites, and business cards and that logo is the first thing they learn about us. Make sure you are leaving a good impression!

What you need, before you need it

Many times a friend will draw a logo, or even professional artists will provide hand drawn artwork or a scanned digital image. This is great for your wall, and a scanned image is good for a website, social media, or small print ads. If you have ever tried to have embroidered shirts or hats made you have encountered the issue of needing a vector image. (If you do not know what this is, check out the Vector Images section) This can lead to expensive setup fees or design fees. DalioDesigns provides a Marketing Media Package with everything you should need for every aspect of your marketing plan to ensure you look good wherever your clientelle encounters you.

• .jpg - Common bitmap image format used for web and small print ads. These will be provided in S,M,L sizes at 72dpi for web use and S,M,L,XL sizes at 300dpi for print. This format does not support transparency and will contain a white or black background depending on the colors of your logo. For use where a background may be needed when laid over content.
• .png - Common bitmap image format used for web and small print ads. These will be provided in S,M,L sizes at 72dpi for web use and S,M,L,XL sizes at 300dpi for print. This format does support transparency so there will be no background that is not part of your logo. For use where you want just your logo to blend with content behind it.
• .pdf - Adobe Acrobat format commonly used in print media. These will be provided in M,L sizes at 300dpi for print. This format does not support transparency and will contain a white or black background depending on the colors of your logo. For use where a background may be needed when laid over content.
• .ai - Adobe Illustrator vector format. Most embroidery, print, and sticker services use Illustrator or a similar program that will support .ai files. These are vector images that can be used for commercial printers or plotter based devices (ex: CNC, embroidery machines, sticker cutters) and are very versatile. Since vector images are unaffected by size, you can print your logo large enough to fill the side of a skyscraper and still be crisp, clean, and proportionate.
• .svg - Common vector format used for websites. There are many reasons to use .svg files since they can be resized without becoming distorted or blurry, and each individual piece can be addressed with code to modify colors. The advantage here is you can use one file for every place the logo appears.

Marketing material for any purpose

Print

DalioDesigns can create material for all of your marketing needs. Big or small, you can get the look you want. Delivered in various formats to be given directly to the printer of your choice: .pdf, .psd, and .ai.

• Posters
• Flyers
• Business Cards
• Banners
• Event Tickets
• Awards
• Advertisements
• Signs

Digital

DalioDesigns can also help you with digital marketing. Interactive or stationary designs you can use on the web, social media, newsletters, or email promotions. Available in various formats ready to use: .jpg, .png, and .html.

• Website Promos
• Virtual Coupons
• Facebook Posts
• Email
• Digital Ads
• Television

What is vector artwork and why do I need it?

Vector vs. Bitmap

For people outside of the design or computing world this can all be very confusing. We will take a basic look at the two types of digital images and how they work, starting with the one most people are more familiar with, the Bitmap Image.

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Bitmap - This is the common type of image. It comes in many formats (.bmp, .jpg, .png, and many others) and it is what your camera, cell phone, or webcam will generate. Used for photos and web, it is exactly what the name implies. It is a map of the bits. It basically tells the device what each row of pixels is doing.

If we take an example image that is 100px by 100px starting at the top left with (0,0) it determines what color each pixel should be, working to the right until (100,0). Next it moves down a row to (0,1) and works right to (100,1), then repeats another 98 times until all the pixels are filled. This works beautifully as long as the image is shown at its original size or smaller.

But what happens when the image needs to be larger than the original? Picture ten people in a room that is 10'x10'. Pretty cramped and no room to move. Each person is touching all the people around them. Now make the room 50'x50' and imagine the result if everyone is still in their same positions and equally spaced. They can no longer touch anyone else and there is a huge space in between.

This is what happens when you stretch an image. The device now has to throw stuff in the gaps that "kind of looks like" the closest pixel, and the result is a blurry image.

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Vector - These images are based off of coordinates like Bitmap images are, but in a completely different way. It uses a point to point path system. You can style these with strokes or fills. For an example we will take a 100px by 100px white square with a black border. The vector image just looks at the points: (0,0) (100,0) (0,100) and (100,100). It now connects the dots, and fill is specified as white and the stroke is black.

Thats all it needs to draw the sample, where a bitmap needs 100 rows of 100 pixels, so 10,000 individual pices of information rather than 6. The other thing is no matter how far those points get from each other, they are always in the same place relative to each other, and the fill is still just "fill the area" so it looks identical at 100p by 100px or 10000px by 10000px.

This is extremely useful for logos, text, and illustrations.. but not so much for photographs. The level of detail in a photo would be more work and data than it is really worth. Photos often are converted in ways to create an illustrated look.

Vector is the Victor

If you have ever seen a business card or flyer with a blurry logo or image you already see the advantage to the flexibility of vector images for print. The section above discussed the resizing advantages.. If you were to decide to put up an ad on a billboard, the same logo you provided for a business card can be blown up large enough to use for a clean and crisp image ten feet wide.

What about on the web? Support for .svg images online has grown and is almost universally functional. Using labels for each path in the image, code can be used to manipulate them. Lets imagine you have a massive logo on your desktop page in full color, a small one for mobile that is full color, and a tiny one on your contact page that is just all white. That is three different images that you need to create, place on the server, and modify if changes are needed. With an .svg file it can be stretched to fit all of the required sizes without blurring, and all the paths and strokes can be set to white for the tiny one.

Great. But what does that do for me? Bandwidth. Using a white square with the word "logo" on it at 30px, 256px, and 512px, it is a total of about 100k bytes. An .svg file can reproduce all three in around 600 bytes. When you add more shapes and colors those files sizes increase dramatically, while the .svg grows a little bit.

In most cases, once you load an image on a page it is cached and does not need to be downloaded again to be displayed again elsewhere. When you have a large site with logos everywhere, the bandwidth savings can be important. Less download time means your page will load faster and reduce the risk of users getting bored and leaving before viewing your content, but there are a lot of mobile users or satellite internet customers that have download caps. They may not notice on your site, but they do appreciate it whether they realize or not!