Start-up series: Why you need a logo with an alpha channel
If you’re a start-up, solopreneur, new sports team or new to branding, you’ll have realised that your logo is your visual shopfront to your business.
Getting it right, will attract your customers because they can instantly tell your market, your size, position, price point and a whole load of other critical information that you may want them to quickly know when they first consider you.
Getting it wrong will deter them and send them somewhere else where their need can be more easily met – instead of them utilising time in the event that you’re not able to solve their problem.
If you’re a digital business where your website is the first ‘touchpoint’ where you interact with them for the first time (and it’s where they’ll form an opinion of you); you’ll want to show yourself in the best possible light. This is where a logo with an alpha channel comes in.
An alpha channel handles the transparency in an image, meaning that you can ‘see’ everything through it – making it look like it has been cut out.
We all know the look when you see an amateur designer renders a logo with the white background – and then places it on a poster, making it look like, well, entirely amateurish!
Sadly, they don’t understand what formats to use in the different contexts that the logo is needed, and so you get a product that’s entirely useless to you.
So when you’re commissioning that agency (or freelance graphic designer on Fiverr), ensure the design brief specifies the digital output includes a version with an alpha channel. This could be a png, pdf, svg, so we’ll be sure to highlight the difference in a future post.
Want us to explain it better in person? Get in touch here and let’s meet for a coffee in Tallinn’s beautiful Old Town – we know just the place!
The pandemic has shown us that focussing your profile-raising activities purely on physical and word-of-mouth interactions is a critical vulnerability for businesses.
It limits you to people in your geographical area of the ad placement, but also that your target customer happens to see it and takes a positive perspective of your organisation afterwards. It doesn’t allow for engagement outside of the local area, and we suspect, that it won’t lead to organic marketing (that is people talking about it) unless it really is remarkable.