Hi, we’re creating master logo files for an international corporation that will be used by many different end-users, most of who should be design/production professionals. It will be accompanied by a style guide outlining proper usage, etc.
Although the logos were created in Illustrator, I hope it’s OK for me to post this question here as an article by David Blatner found on this site (dated Feb 25, 2011) seemed to give me the best direction so far in regards to appropriate final file types (and attempts to get ‘expert’ advice in more appropriate forums has been far less than desirable). I think the questions and workflow would apply the same as if we’d created the logos in InDesign.
The logos are 100% vector, and in years past we would save them out as EPS files. But we understand from that article (and others we’ve read) that EPS is a bit antiquated and limited. So we want to save all master files as PDFs, but we want to make sure we are using the best possible settings when exporting to keep quality and color-compliance at it’s highest, while also being as compatible as possible.
LOGO SPECS:
– As mentioned, the logo files are 100% vector, but are using some pretty advanced gradient meshes in Illustrator to simulate a ‘metallic’ emblem. We’ve made it grayscale (only K channel in CMYK). The smoothness needs to be retained.
– They also may have a couple small inner/outer glows, which we understand may be rasterized in the conversion. We’ve set the Document Raster settings pretty high to account for this.
– They need to retain transparent backgrounds so they will work on any background color.
– We have created RGB (using sRGB profile), CMYK (not color managed) and spot PMS versions.
QUESTIONS:
1) First, keeping in mind what’s important (complex gradients, transparent backgrounds, etc), what PDF version should we use (e.g., 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, etc) that would keep quality high but be as compatible as possible with common design software (possibly not the latest versions)?
2) Are we right to only embed color profiles on the RGB versions? We don’t want the CMYK or PMS numbers to change at all, and we have no way of knowing final output intent.
3) Any other settings or tips we should know as we make these files (there will be 30+ final files when complete)? We really need to do this right.
Thanks for any help or tips! Please let me know if there is a more appropriate place to get expert help on these things (even for a fee). I tried the Acrobat and Illustrator forums, but people were still telling me to save the files in a dozen different formats including EPS.
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