Why You Shouldn’t Make a Logo in Photoshop

Abrarhasan

Adobe Photoshop can seem capable of anything. It is known for photo touch-ups, but it is so powerful that it can accomplish digital painting, video editing, web design and even 3D graphical artwork. As a result, you might assume it is possible to design a logo in Photoshop. The reality, however, is much more complicated. Illustration showing Photoshop icon crossed out Design by OrangeCrush In spite of appearances, Photoshop is not magic. It may be one of the most commonly used graphics software—by everyone from professional photographers and graphic designers to grandmothers touching up family photos. It may even have become one of those rare products to be used as a verb (any manipulated image is often accused of being ”photoshopped”). As one of the premiere graphic design programs on the market, Photoshop is made for many people with many diverse needs, but there are some projects for which Photoshop is not only an imperfect tool, it is the worst tool possible.

In particular, Photoshop should never be used for logo design. Let’s discuss why. The requirements for a logo design — Logo design is primarily expected to play a role in branding, and this tends to demand the logo is ever present in all potential points of contact with a business. To this end, a number of standard best practices have been baked into both the aesthetic and technical requirements for logo design. First, a logo design must be prepared to work in a seemingly infinite number of different contexts. Some of these are fairly obvious from the start: a business card, a website header, a letterhead, a t-shirt, etc. But assuming your business is going to last for a background remove service while, you can’t always plan for every situation ahead of time, and you may find yourself needing to use your logo on, say, a moving vehicle or an aerial banner. Corporate logo design mockup A logo has to be adaptable to a variety of different contexts and sizes. Design by goopanic All of this means that the creative decisions must account for versatility in logo design. The logo has to look equally good whether it is scaled up to 100 ft high or scaled down to the dimensions of a postage stamp.



This tends to lead to styles that are simplistic in nature. For example, you could design a logo with twenty colors and complex shading, but detail like that tends to get lost at small sizes. In addition, extra colors can be expensive to print, which means you might all of a sudden find yourself bleeding money over a bulk order of business cards. On the technical side, the software that creates the logo must be able to accomplish wholesale changes on the fly. Your designer might provide a full color logo, an all black logo, and an all white logo. But let’s say, for example, your company participates in a breast cancer charity event and wants to add a pink accent to the logo. Ideally, they shouldn’t have to contract another designer just to change the color. Similarly, your final logo will be set up at one standard size, and you should be able to increase or decrease this at will without any loss in image quality, which you’ll be able to do with a vector file, but not with a raster image.