Why a website built by strangers uses your logo wrong

The pitch for using one supplier is normally convenience, which is a weak argument. Managing four suppliers is not that hard. The real argument is that a brand degrades at the seams between them, and it degrades in ways nobody flags because every individual decision was defensible.

How it actually goes wrong

Five small things. Individually nothing. Together they are the reason a brand can look sharp in the guidelines document and vague everywhere a customer meets it.

• The web developer needs the logo on a dark header, only has the full-colour version, and adds a white box behind it. Perfectly sensible. Now there is a white box in your brand.
• The mark has a minimum clear space. Nobody told the developer, so it sits eight pixels from a heading and reads as part of it.
• Brand blue is a print colour. Converted naively to screen it turns slightly purple, and every button on the site is now slightly the wrong blue.
• The video editor has a PNG at 800 pixels and needs it at 4K. It gets upscaled and the edges go soft in the one place people are looking.
• The social manager needs a square avatar, crops the horizontal lockup, and the wordmark disappears. The icon alone was never designed to carry the name.

What keeping it together fixes

When the same studio draws the mark and builds the site, the dark-background variant exists before anybody needs it, because the person who drew it knew a dark header was coming. The screen palette is defined alongside the print one. The video team has the vector. The square avatar is a designed lockup rather than a crop.

None of that is clever. It is just the difference between assets produced in anticipation and assets requested under deadline.

The honest counter-argument

One supplier is also one point of failure, and a studio that is genuinely excellent at logos may be mediocre at apps. That is a fair objection and the answer is to check the work rather than the pitch: look at the websites, look at the animation, and if a discipline is thin in the portfolio, treat it as thin.

The other legitimate reason to split suppliers is that you already have a brand you are happy with. In that case what you need is not a new identity, it is a proper set of guidelines so the next four suppliers make fewer of the mistakes above.

If you are using several suppliers, ask for these

1. 1A reversed (light-on-dark) lockup and a single-colour version, as vectors.
2. 2A square, avatar-safe lockup that still reads at 32 pixels.
3. 3Screen colour values as well as print ones, stated explicitly.
4. 4Minimum size and minimum clear space, written down.
5. 5The editable master files, not just exports. Everything above becomes possible with them and impossible without.