Screens & Tones

The use of screens and tones in your logo design. A primer

When working on your logo design using two spot colors, your designer may choose to add screens and tones of a particular color. If handled correctly, this should not be a concern – it will not increase the reproduction costs of your logo, while giving the appearance of more colors than we’re actually using. In reality, the ‘new’ color isn’t new at all. It is merely a percentage of the color that’s already present, and doesn’t require any additional printing costs.

Let’s take a look at the image above. As this is vector based artwork, we’ve dropped two solid colors into our Factory logo. It is a two color spot logo using red (PMS 185) and black (PMS Black). Say we wanted to add silver to our logo. Not a problem. We can simply ‘pour’ a percentage screen of black into that vector shape (as shown above in the letter G and O in logo). This tone, or screen, is created with various sizes and densities of dots all made up of black. This is same principle involved in creating grayscale logo images. Because this is a vector based image, the physical size of the image does not matter. The letters we add silver to will be always be filled with the maximum resolution of dots and print accordingly. This feature of an vector based image is a great advantage over pixel based images, which are severely limited in the ability to change colors quickly and accurately, as well as use at larger that original sizes. Visit the design help center for a quick reference guide for all logo formats.

Logo design formats – Vectors & Pixels

Logo design formats explained. Video graphically illustrates the advantages of vector-based artwork over its pixel-based (raster) based counterpart and illustrates why you should (almost) never design a logo in Photoshop.
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