Your campaign logo doesn't live in one place. It has to work blown up on a highway banner and shrunk onto a palm card, printed on a t-shirt back and a car magnet. A logo that looks great on your laptop but turns to mush on a yard sign has failed at its one job. Here's how to design a mark that holds up everywhere.

Legibility Beats Cleverness

A voter reads a yard sign in the second it takes to drive past. That means your name has to dominate, in a bold, clean typeface with strong contrast. Fancy scripts, thin lines and tight letter spacing vanish at distance and at small sizes. When in doubt, make the name bigger and simpler.

Design for the Hardest Format First

Design your logo to work on the yard sign — the format with the least reading time and the most distance. If it's legible there, it will be legible on a palm card and a t-shirt too. Design for the business card first and it falls apart the moment it's enlarged.

Keep the Elements Few

• Name — the largest element, always
• Office — smaller, beneath or beside the name
• One accent — a star, a shape, a rule line; not five
• Two or three colors — more than that muddies at a distance

One Logo, Every Piece

The payoff of a strong, simple logo is consistency: the same mark on your yard signs, banners, cards, shirts and magnets turns scattered impressions into recognition. Design it once to work everywhere, then print everything from the same file.