A Holiday Version of the Logo

The logo in a Santa hat

Around now, plenty of small business logos are wearing Santa hats. Others have snow along the tops of their letters, a wreath around the whole mark, or a sudden switch from blue to red and green.

At full size, on a website header or a poster, the holiday version is often charming. It suggests a business with a sense of humour and someone who cares about details.

The trouble starts when the same file goes everywhere the logo appears, including places where it is shown the size of a fingernail.

There the hat becomes the logo, and the business disappears behind it.

Where a logo is shown tiny

• The browser tab icon, often sixteen pixels square.
• Profile pictures beside every post and reply on social media.
• Message and inbox lists, where customers look for a familiar picture.
• The photo on a Google listing, beside reviews and in search results.
• Phone home screens, for anyone who saved the site as an icon.
• Email signatures, which often shrink the image further.

The second is where a holiday version does most damage. People scrolling recognise a business by its picture before its name, and Instagram, and now Twitter, crop that picture into a circle.

What happens at small sizes

Holiday additions are usually drawn at full size, where they look small and neat. Shrink the logo to a few millimetres and every detail shrinks with it, except that a bold red hat stays bold and red.

Thin snow along the tops of letters blurs into a grey edge. A wreath around the mark pushes the mark inward, so it ends up smaller than before.

A colour change is worst. Many customers know a logo by its colour before its shape, and a blue logo turned red and green is, at thumbnail size, another logo.

Words added to the logo, such as a greeting under the name, become unreadable first, and they push the name smaller to make room.

Keep the change small

The safest holiday version adds one small element and changes nothing else: the same shape, colours and wordmark, with a hat on one corner or a sprig of holly beside it.

Design it for the size it will appear at, not only for a poster. Then shrink it to thumbnail size and look again, ideally on a phone.

If the logo has a mascot, the mascot can wear the hat. That is the one case where an addition sits naturally on the logo itself.

Use it where the logo is large

A holiday version belongs where it has room: the website header, a holiday page, the top of a December email, a cover photo, a poster in the window.

It does not belong in the tab icon, the profile pictures, the listing photo, or anything printed that outlasts December, such as menus or gift card holders.

Changing a Facebook page's profile picture usually appears as a post to followers too. Doing it in December and again in January puts two posts about your logo in their feeds.

A worked example

A virtual reality arcade in a suburban shopping centre has a simple logo: the outline of a headset in electric blue, with the name in capitals beneath.

Last December a staff member made a holiday version: a Santa hat over the headset, snow along the letters and a red and green wreath around the lot.

It went into the website header, the tab icon, every profile picture and the Google listing. On the header it looked fun.

As a profile picture, the wreath shrank the headset to a smudge and the hat became the only clear shape. Parents messaging about birthday bookings saw a red blob they did not recognise.

Nobody put the original back. The hat stayed on the listing until March, and on one profile until a customer mentioned it in the spring.

This year the holiday version is the usual blue headset with a small hat on one corner, used only in the website header and the December email. A note in the manager's calendar for January 2 lists both.

Festive without touching the logo

Most of the festive effect can come from around the logo rather than inside it: a holiday cover photo, a seasonal banner on the website, photographs of the premises decorated.

Posts can carry the season too: the staff in hats, holiday hours in your usual colours, a short greeting.

A holiday line in the email signature, written as text, does the same job without touching the image.

Each of those is cheerful without asking customers to recognise a different mark.

Putting the original back

The hard part of a holiday logo is not making it but removing it. December ends with a long weekend and a slow return, and the hat stays.

Before anything goes up, list every place the holiday version will appear and the date each one switches back, with a name beside it.

Keep the original files untouched, and put the year in the holiday files' names, so nobody overwrites the real logo or reuses an old holiday version by mistake.

Some places update slowly. A listing photo or a browser's stored tab icon can linger for days, one more reason to keep the holiday version out of them.

The counter-case

Some businesses can go further. A shop whose trade is Christmas, or one whose mascot is well known enough to survive any costume, can reasonably play with the logo for the season.

A holiday graphic posted once, rather than swapped into a profile, carries little risk either way.

And a business already using three versions of its logo has a bigger problem than a hat.

For most, keep the change small, use it only where the logo appears large, and put the original back in the first week of January.

Before the break

1. List every place the holiday logo appears.
2. Shrink it to thumbnail size and look.
3. Restore the original in tab icons and profiles.
4. Keep the usual colours in any version.
5. Name holiday files with the year.
6. Set a switch-back date for every place.
7. Check the listing and profiles in January.

Step six is the one most often skipped. A holiday logo goes up with a deadline and comes down without one, which is how a Santa hat reaches March.

A holiday version left in place turns into a small case of the problem in two logos in use at once.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.