Logo design for Newcastle businesses

Letters a signmaker can cut one by one

Newcastle City Council's guide to shopfronts in the historic environment is clear about name signs. Only two kinds are considered appropriate, on a traditional or a modern shopfront: painted lettering, or cut-out freestanding letters fixed individually to the fascia, made from metal and standing no more than 50mm proud of it. Lettering should be no more than two-thirds of the fascia height, and phone numbers, web addresses and opening hours should not be on the fascia at all, because they change and clutter it. It dates from October 2011, and the Grainger Town Shopfront Design Guide SPD is the formal guidance in the Grainger Market and Clayton Street area, so check the current rules with the council before you order a sign.

That shapes the wordmark before anyone sketches an icon. A name drawn as one joined shape, a script where every letter links to the next, or letters that overlap, cannot be cut out and fixed one by one without losing the thing that made it work. We draw wordmarks whose letters stand apart, with counters open enough to cut cleanly, and we keep the phone number and web address out of the logo, so the logo goes on the fascia and the details go on the door.

Lighting follows the same rule. The guide says no shopfront sign should be internally illuminated, and lists white halo illumination behind freestanding letters as one of the types it may consider appropriate. Halo light shows the outline of each letter against the wall, so a solid letter reads at night where a thin one fades.

Read next: Shopfront signage design · Logo files your designer should hand over

A hanging sign with a vertical emphasis

If you have a hanging sign too, the guide sets its shape: no more than 600mm out from the building, no more than 750mm tall, no part of it lower than 2.4m above the pavement, and a vertical emphasis. It also notes that traditional hanging signs often took the form of a trade symbol rather than text.

So the logo needs a symbol that can hang on its own in an upright frame and still be recognised by someone walking towards it. Every logo we deliver includes an icon-only and a stacked layout, both of which suit a tall board, and we draw the symbol from one detail of your trade, which is what those older trade signs did. See everything included in Logo Design.

Read next: Wordmark or icon: which logo do you need?

Keep the castle for the council

Newcastle's arms are three silver castles on a red shield. The council's account of its civic insignia says they were in use as long ago as the fourteenth century and were made official by the College of Arms in 1954.

A castle in a business logo therefore says civic Newcastle before it says anything about you, and it puts you beside every other firm that reached for the same picture. We draw the mark from your business instead. If the place matters to your customers, put it in the small descriptor line and write Newcastle upon Tyne in full: Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire is a separate borough, and a descriptor that says only Newcastle can point a customer to the wrong one.