As a person who is involved in producing logoed apparel and products to help businesses promote themselves, I run into one problem consistently from clients: “Why does it cost so much to print my logo on a pen, etc.?” when their logo has multiple colors or is a logo that can only be reproduced with a 4-color process.

Let me make this easy for you: If you are a 100% Web-based business and never deal in the physical world with anyone, indulge yourself in any one of the 256 million colors available to produce your logo. Web colors are plentiful and dirt cheap. Physical reproduction of those Web colors is not.

There are several types of printing processes to produce an ad specialty item with your logo and marketing message on it, but here are two of the most common:

1) Silk-screen: Silkscreening involves burning an image of each colored item of your logo onto a separate screen. Then, the screens are set to lay down one color at a time onto the item in an array designed to match your logo. Each color (usually) requires a separate set-up charge, and, sometimes, an additional run charge. If you have a logo that consists of more than 2 colors, be ready to dish-out a lot of cash to reproduce your logo to match your original design.

2) 4-Color Process: This involves using combinations of the 4 basic colors that can be combined to make a replication of any 4-color logo or colored photograph. Those 4 colors are referred to as “CMYK”: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow (Yellow), Black.

You can listen to your graphics designer, but you should also tell him/her that they can be “creative” with using 1-2 colors to develop your logo, and to make it possible that the logo will look alright as a one-color logo as well.

Posted by Bill Simon on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 9:33 am | under Uncategorized |RSS 2.0 feed | Respond, or Trackback.