Some logos are built from lines and empty space together. Open marks like these share one weakness: they lean heavily on the background.
On a flat color that’s no problem. On a photo, the background is different everywhere.
What happens
Wherever part of the logo lands on a patch of the photo with similar brightness, that part disappears.
What’s left still makes a plausible shape. At first glance it doesn’t look broken. It just looks like the composition is a bit odd there.
We went through three versions on this, and each time we thought it was fixed. The first two changed the logo itself: heavier strokes, adjusted proportions, a different version. None of it worked, because the problem wasn’t in the logo.
The fix
Put a backing between the logo and the photo: a shape that follows the logo, slightly larger, in the brand’s ground color.
It can be solid, or semi-transparent with a blur. The point is that every part of the logo sits on a background we control.
How to check
Don’t look at the whole image.
Zoom the composite in until you can see the pixels, then work along the logo’s edge comparing the brightness inside and outside, point by point. Wherever the difference falls below the threshold is where the logo will disappear.
We looked at both earlier versions and thought they were fine. Looking back, both times we were only seeing the half that was still there.
