STYLE GUIDE

Logos

This section describes how the HYMS logo and other logos should be used.

Use the HYMS logo on the first page, or front cover, of all official communications.

This includes:

• letters
• publications
• websites
• exhibition materials
• posters and flyers
• adverts
• briefings
• stationery.

It can also include signage where this is appropriate.

Never distort the logo or remove parts of it.

When the logo is used, it should always appear in its entirety and undistorted. You can resize it to suit your purposes, as long as it remains legible, but please don't:

• move or delete the text
• stretch it
• squash it.

There's an easy way to tell if the logo has been distorted. Every capital O in the logo should be a perfect circle (that's a property of the Gill Sans font). If the Os don't look circular to you, something has gone wrong.

Never try to recreate the HYMS logo. Always use the original graphic.

The logo is a single, designed graphic, not a collection of parts. The proportions and spacing of the text have been tweaked, so it's (virtually) impossible to recreate it manually by drawing boxes and typing text. If you need to use the logo and you don't have a copy of the image file, contact the Communications Office.

If your document is in colour, the logo must be in colour too.

The logo colours are the same as the official HYMS colours, namely indigo (Pantone 275) and orange (Pantone 137).

If your document is being printed in greyscale, the logo should appear in greyscale too. Normally, this is easy: just insert the colour logo into your document, then print the document in greyscale. Most printers do a reasonable job of rendering the logo in two tones of grey, but do just check to make sure the orange elements haven't turned white and vanished. If this happens, contact the Communications Office for a proper greyscale version of the logo which should fix the problem.

If using greyscale is impossible and you absolutely have to use monochrome (for instance, when faxing), the orange parts are liable to turn white and disappear completely. This is not acceptable. In this case, please contact the Communications Office for a monochrome version of the logo which uses outlines to maintain its integrity.

See the section on Colours for more information.

The logo always has a white background.

The logo is not transparent. Its background is always white. If the background of your page is another colour, make sure it doesn't show through behind the logo. Place the logo on top of a borderless white box if this helps.

Allow a little white space around the logo.

To keep it distinctive and avoid 'crowding out', the logo should never rub right up against other elements on the page. Instead, a small area of white space (an 'exclusion zone') should surround the logo on all sides.

As a minimum, the amount of white space should be roughly the height and width of the capital letter O in 'YORK'. It's fine to judge this by eye, and be more generous if you need to: if the logo is very small in your document, then perhaps allow a little more space.

Official image files of the logo have this white space built in, so you should never need to worry about it. For that reason, please don't crop the logo image files.

The HYMS logo can stand alone, or alongside the logos of partner institutions.

The HYMS logo usually stands alone. In that capacity, the phrase 'Hull York Medical School' is taken to represent a partnership between the University of York, the University of Hull and the NHS, as well as standing for HYMS itself. So you should never feel obliged to include the logo of either or both Universities alongside the HYMS logo.

But if you do use one or both of them, you should follow the separate visual identity guidelines published by each University:

• York visual identity guidelines
• Hull visual identity guidelines

In general, if you decide to use both University logos, make sure they are equally sized and placed. Don't worry that the actual words 'the University of Hull' will come out a lot smaller that way; that's just the way the logos are.

Refer external requests to Communications.

The HYMS logo is the property of HYMS. Since it represents our identity and brand, we need to keep careful tabs on where and how it's used.

So if any external organisation wants to use the logo, this request should be passed to the HYMS Communications Office.