Every company should have a page like this one, in my opinion. I’m saying this because I spent a good chunk of my day today trying to assemble presentable versions of over two dozen logos to appear in a presentation for a client. For three hours, I hunted down replacements for a host of logos swiped from Web sites at small sizes and scaled up to ungainly proportions by the magical un-prettifying powers of Microsoft PowerPoint. It would have made my life much easier to be able to find an officially sanctioned version of, say, the Lycos logo — at a decent scale and against a clean, white background — rather than having to manually retouch the one tucked into the upper left hand corner on the company’s home page.

Logos Have to Grow up Some Time

To a corporate communications officer, making such assets available to the general public might seem to be a surefire way of losing control of the brand. But I’d wager that, more often than not, such a resource would be put to good use, if for no other reason that the vast majority of companies are just not interesting enough for pranksters to bother with their logos. At least, such a danger is not sufficient to outweigh the benefits of making sure that when a company’s partners, customers and clients use a mark that its integrity is maintained. The alternative is to risk rogue designers resorting to their own devices, which I did today, or resorting to more shady resources, like this questionably legal logo repository. The short of it is that not all communications can be controlled, so why not try and make sure your logo always looks the best it can, regardless of the context?