Print marketing works best when designers and marketers can easily work together. So it helps when both know at least the basics of each other's craft.

Here are print design essentials that all marketers should keep in mind.

Logos should be versatile

Your logo is your brand's most important visual identifier, so it's important to have a logo that's attractive, eye-catching, both Web- and print-friendly, and representative of your brand's identity. But many marketers don't realize that versatility is crucial in logo design, and that certain print projects may call for your logo to be flexible in certain ways.

For example, you can't have a logo that relies entirely on color, since you'll often be forced to print in black and white. Logos also need to be scalable; since print comes in many sizes, your logo can't have a lot of extraneous details that won't translate well when shrunken down onto a business card.

That's not to say that you can't have highly creative logos with colors and textures. But when you strip away all the excess from your logo, you should still have a clear visual identity that customers can recognize.

Preserve your brand colors

When you print full-color media, what you see is actually a combination of cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) inks. But the colors you see on your computer monitor are different; they are composed of red, green, and blue (RGB) light. These different color systems mean that your final printed product may have some discrepancies from the digital version.

You may not notice the difference in some cases—color photographs look fairly accurate using CMYK—but the difference will be noticeable in your brand's trademark colors. The best way to ensure color consistency is to rely on PMS spot printing, which uses a premixed universal ink color mixing system.

Simply match your brand color to the corresponding PMS color, and you'll always have the perfect tone for your branded marketing materials, no matter whom you print with. Spot printing can even be applied to projects that use CMYK inks, so you can have full-color designs while still maintaining color accuracy when it counts.

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What Every Marketer Should Know About Print Design

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Vladimir Gendelman

Vladimir Gendelman is founder and CEO of Company Folders Inc. He has spent over a decade learning the ins and outs of print marketing and specializes in helping businesses create quality marketing materials they can be proud of.

LinkedIn: Vladimir Gendelman