Why you need a separate inverted logo

🙈 My client used the wrong logo version.
Take a look at that logo on Mike Reid's apron.
To make this depiction of his laughing face work on both dark and light backgrounds, we need two separate versions of the logo.
Now you could argue that it’s my fault and that I’ve made this too complicated for the client, and that a good logo should work well in any colour.
But if a design uses shadows and highlights, then you MUST have a separate version to use on dark backgrounds.
A great example of this is the ‪@bafta‬ logo. Their logo is a one-colour depiction of a bronze mask, and when I went to use it on a dark background for a campaign back in my early days as a digital designer, I broke the cardinal rule and just added a white colour overlay in Photoshop. And I wrecked it.
When I went through their brand guidelines to see what I did wrong, I was blown away. It was the most elegant solution I’d seen that solves this problem. Their logo designer had made an extra version with added borders and extra highlights at the edges to keep the shadowed sections using a dark colour.
And this is exactly how I treated Mike’s logo. I added a highlight to the side of his head, and even these little curls to keep the shape of the hair.
But there’s another reason that you might need a treated inverted option. And it’s to do with something called the irradiation illusion.
Logo designs with a little more detail, or logotypes that are text-based only, will often look really bloated when you just change them to white. It has something to do with the scattering of light inside the eye, but we designers often need to account for this by offsetting our designs by a couple of pixels.
So the next time you need to use a client logo on a dark background. Think twice before you just change the colour to white, because there’s almost certainly a dedicated inverted option to use for situations like this… Mike. 😉
#logodesign #graphicdesign #opticalillusion
My portfolio: barnard.co/
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Buy my Illustrator course here: barnard.co/course

[@TheDarkHart]

Finally somebody has grace us with this knowledge.
I'm so glad I'm not the only one who faced this problem 😂.
Loved the vid thank you

[@barnardco]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@RS-xb9lo]

I just fixed a similar problem I had with a logo I created thanks to this tutorial. Thank you 👍

[@OrincyWhyteDesigns]

Thank you

[@barnardco]

👊