But printing has advanced greatly. Today’s printers handle images just as easily as they do fonts. And in our multi-channel world, there are some drawbacks to using fonts for logos and signatures. Today’s documents don’t just get sent to the printer to be rendered on paper. Our documents also go to web browsers and cell phones.

 

Online devices generally use different font formats than the printer. Web browsers may use default fonts selected by the user. When a default font is used in place of a custom font, your logo or signature might just look like ABCD on the webpage. If you transform your print file to PDF for online viewing, you will need to convert those custom font characters to raster images, or get a matching TrueType or Type 1 font built, and embed it in the PDF file. When the PDF file is scaled, raster images may look fuzzy and white lines may appear between the characters.

 

Things get even trickier when you want to move to a color logo. If your logo uses block shapes and only 2 colors, you can have a font built where the shapes for one color are in different characters than the shapes for the other color. With careful attention to positioning, you can line up the characters to make your logo look correct. If your logo uses gradient colors or more than 2 colors, it is better to use a color image format, rather than try to do it with a font.