Knowing The Importance of Corporate Identity
Take a look at big names in the computer industry like Microsoft, Dell, or Macromedia. How many times has Microsoft changed it’s logo in the past 10 years. If you said zero, then you’re right. Microsoft’s logo is the cornerstone of their corporate identity, an identity built up over the past 10 years using countless resources and advertising.

You can see how important establishing a corporate identity is for your business. But, why bother building up your image if you’re not going to make it available or accessible to the media?

Press Areas
One excellent way of making your image available is through a “press area” on your website. This press section would include vital information about your business, management profiles, but most importantly, it would feature downloadable logo files.

Many companies, especially software companies, also feature downloadable product box shots and other types of images that establish the same kind of corporate identity that a logo would.

It’s also very important to make the link to your press area fairly prominent on your site, ideally with the rest of your site navigation.

File Formats You Should Use
So, you’ve got the press area to your site set up, and now you’re ready to throw some downloadable logos up. But what size should you make them? What file format should they be in? What file size is too big?

The easiest way of handling your logos would be with high quality JPGs. JPG is an industry standard file format that most every image editing program exports and reads, so there would minimal incompatibility issues. Make your JPG logo very large so that users can scale the logo down as needed.

Making your logos available for download in high quality JPG format is simple:

1) Open your favorite graphics editor.

2) Open your logo files, ideally these would be program specific files, like an Adobe Illustrator *.ai file, or a Macromedia Freehand *.fhx file that you could edit without image loss.

3) It’s a good idea to work at a higher resolution in this process, so if you’re graphics program allows it, set your image resolution to 300 dpi or higher.

4) Scale your logo to a large size, like 640×480, or even bigger if you’d like.

5) Export your large, high resolution logo as a JPG file with the quality set at 100, no smoothing. (Some programs offers a “loss” option instead of quality. if your program uses “loss”, set it to 0)

The file size of your logo will probably be large. If it’s over 1 megabyte in size, I would suggest compressing it into a ZIP or RAR file.

Another way of making logos available for download is to use *.eps files. The EPS (encapsulated post script) format is one that allows scaling up and down without loss. You open the EPS file with a professional graphics program like Adobe Photoshop and choose how large you’d like the logo to be, and the program will render a logo to your liking.

The only problem with EPS logos is that the end user must have a professional graphics editing program like Adobe Photoshop to read the files. Incompatibility issues would be significantly greater with this approach.

My advice would be not to use this format unless you’re tailoring your press area for print media. That is, the logos obtained from your press area will be printed in publications, and not just on the Internet in digital format.

If this is your aim, then exporting files as *.eps is simple:

1) Open a professional graphics editing program like Adobe Illustrator.

2) Open your logo files. It’s pretty imperative in this case that you have source files to work with, Adobe *.ai or other.

3) Since you can scale *.eps files, it’s not important that you make your logo image large. So, make your logo a nice moderate size.

4) Export your logo as an *.eps file. Your graphics program may have multiple types of *.eps files. Any kind of EPS will do, but if you’re still unsure, choose a DCS option or a Photoshop option.

Now, you should have a scalable *.eps file that can be used by print designers everywhere!

Press Area Disclaimer
It’s a very good idea to include a disclaimer on your press area page that warns users of improper logo use. Clearly define all of the parameters that your company has set for logo use, and make the user agree to follow them before any downloading begins.

Better to be safe than sorry!

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