Mind the gap… around a logo

Anyone who has placed a logo that had a strict set of rules in the stylesheet knows how confusing it can be to determine the clear-space around a logo. Often, stylesheets present a clear-space around a logo in the following manner:

In this instance, the value of X is half the width of the rolled-up poster in the graphic. That’s fine when used at scale, but when placing the logo, there is nothing to indicate the clearspace.

This is further complicated if the logo has to be scaled upwards or downwards, as the clear-space too has to be scaled. It can involve formulas to work out the amount of clear-space, or doing what most of us are probably doing but not admitting and ignoring the rules completely, placing the graphics by eye instead.

Another issue is that of logos being scaled beyond their minimum size. I find that this is normally because while the style-sheet dictates the minimum size, the logo supplied is at another size – not the minimum size that the logo should be.

The solution: Include the clear-space areas as part of the graphic

This can be accomplished by making a box that has a white fill with no stroke to represent the area that is to be the clear space around the logo, and send it to the back of the logo. While the box is selected, go to the transparency palette and set the transparency to multiply with an opacity of 100%. Lastly, with the transparent white box still selected, go to the Object menu, Artboards, Fit to selected art. Save the file as either an illustrator file or PDF.

Now whenever this graphic is placed into InDesign, no matter what box size is used to import the image, the logo will always maintain its clear space as part of the logo.

Create the logo as the minimum size

Many style-sheets dictate the smallest size a logo should to be in height and width. By creating the logo at the smallest size that the style-sheet allows, the logo will be placed in InDesign at its minimum size and can only be scaled above 100%. Sure, it doesn’t prevent users scaling the logo beyond the smallest size, but if users are unsure what the smallest size is, the style sheet can tell clients to place the given logo at 100% scale into InDesign.

Now before you start heading for the comments box below to say that this only works if the logo is being placed onto a white background, that is incorrect as the following screenshot out of InDesign shows:

That screenshot was taken while using the overprint preview in InDesign. If using the regular preview, the layout will look something like this:

But it will still output to PDF and print as it did in the overprint preview picture.