Please… Do NOT Stretch the Logo.

So, pretty much anyone over the age of 40 likely remembers watching movies on analog tv years ago.  I’m talking about back in the days of big, heavy, boxy tv’s before digital widescreen and flatscreen TV’s became the standard.  If so, you might remember watching a movie and, as the film wound down towards the ending, the picture would suddenly become oddly stretched.  Actors heads would become excessively tall and skinny as the end credits began to run. This was because, before the era of widescreen tv’s, movies that were FILMED for widescreen theater projection didn’t quite fit on our tv screens.  The films would be cropped to the center, cutting off a couple of inches of the movie on each side.  But films had credits at the end that were too wide to be cropped and still readable, so the tv broadcasters got around this by squishing the films in at the ends to make sure everything fit.

You’re probably wondering what this has to do with logo design.  I’m sure you remember noticing that something felt weird at the end of those movies. Remember watching JAWS and, for just a minute, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss’s heads get all long and distorted as the end credits begin to roll?  And those credits looked odd too.  The letters that used the same typeface as the opening credits became stretched and too tall.  Our brains tend to pick up on things that have been distorted – even a little bit.  When a graphic designer creates a typeface or a logo, they are designed with specific proportions and altering those proportions creates a sense of disconnect.  Our brains tend to notice that something is just…off.

At GBS, when we design a logo for a client, we include a sheet called a Branding Guide with additional information about that logo. This sheet includes the colors used, the fonts that have been chosen and, most importantly, the RULES of how the logo should be used. This includes instructions to NEVER stretch, squash, or otherwise alter the final proportions of the finished logo. Of course, in a world of social media where each platform often requires different proportions, most people don’t think twice about squishing a long, horizontal logo to fit into a square Facebook profile picture size.  But, ultimately, it damages the appearance of the logo and just doesn’t look good.  When we design logos, we need to keep this ever-changing digital landscape in mind and design in such a way as to provide versions for multiple uses that work well in square profile images AND on long cover photos or web banners.  It’s something that takes a little extra work and a lot of thinking to make happen properly, but it’s all part and parcel of the new creative process in the digital age.

Your logo is the “face” of your brand, and nobody wants their face stretched like the end of a movie on TV in the 1980’s.

Written by Blog Contributor: Dee Fish