Logo design footprints.
Is your logo being 'out of the box' - literally - hurting it's usage?
 The 'footprint' (the physical boundaries that are required for reproduction) of your logo design is often overlooked when inexperienced designers are developing their first logos. Using a footprint effectively is sometimes key to a logos success. Simply put, you can imagine your new logo's footprint as a bounding box around the minimum area needed to reproduce your logo. Let's take a look at the Links logo and its footprint:
When designing a logo it is important to keep in mind 'trailing elements' of your logo - that is, parts of your logo that extend beyond the main image area. Take a look at the Links logo above. This logo features a large trailing element (the star) that extends beyond the main area of the logo. This trailing element affects the logo's footprint quite dramatically and affects the size of the logo when used in artwork where the width of the logo is a factor. Let's take a look at another logo, this one with a square aspect ratio and more orthodox footprint.
As we can see, the Sight Effects logo can reproduce at a much bigger size (when width is the determining factor). While there are certainly no hard and fast rules when it comes to logo footprints, it is certainly something to think about in the initial design phases.
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