A Color Finders Story
Hello there, we are TeamColorCodes and our goal is to bring you the newest and precise color info for your favorite sports teams. It sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? We pick the team, find the official logo and get the color value from there. But there is much more that happens behind the curtains and we’d like to share this process with you.
We always deliver RGB, CMYK, HEX and PANTONE values for every color used in the logo, so there is a matter of converting color values from one format to another. All that info is only valid if we find the official logo (in SVG format) or the logo guideline document for the specific team. But that can sometimes be tricky. In this article we would like to show you the work we put in finding the logo color information for your favorite team.
As we said before it all starts with picking a team. Let’s use an imaginary team for this example – Teamy Mcteamface. The first thing we do is go to their website and try to find the official logo guideline PDF (it contains info for all colors used in the logo and the home and away kits, as well as some other color related stuff). American teams sometimes have this document on their website and it’s easy to find, but if it’s not really in the open, we google our way to it. So now that we have the color info PDF we can go to converting colors and adding new teams to our website.
Unfortunately, most European teams as well as some smaller American ones don’t have the specific information we’re looking for. In that case the next best thing would be to find an actual logo on their official website in the SVG format. SVG is important because it is a vector-based file and the color info we would extract from it would be precise so there’s no room for mistakes. In most cases the logos we find on official websites are in either JPG or PNG formats, and those are no good to us, as color info in these files is very easily changed and can’t be used as verified information. For example, when we download several JPG or PNG logos from the same source, color info will be different in each case. Small difference but difference all the same. So, which one is the right one?
Next thing we do is we scour the internet for Teamy Mcteamface logo in SVG format. When we find it, we analyze if the source is credible enough to be used on our website. For example, let’s say that Teamy Mcteamface is an English Championship League team, and that we found the SVG format logo on an official UEFA website. This would mean that the logo is from a verified website and we can use it.
In other cases, we can’t and won’t use information from other color websites, Wiki pages or fan pages that don’t have verified sources. These sites are simply not precise enough and even though the colors may look similar or even the same they aren’t. Well that’s the difference between a verified source and just a source. One is precise and you can be sure that YOUR FAVOURITE team actually uses it, and the other one is similar enough. Not good enough for true fans in our book.
That’s why we always try to find the official color info and we always put our source information at the end of our post. So what happens when it’s impossible to find the logo guideline document, an SVG logo from the official website or a verified source, and we are left with just the PNG and JPG logos from the official website, you may ask? Well, although those are verified sources, the information itself (in cases of JPGS and PNGS) is not precise enough. In these cases, we would download ALL the PNG and JPG logo files from one official source and only use the ones that have the same exact color value used most often. We mark all our info so you know if it’s verified or not.
That marks the end of the journey for one team’s color information. It could seem a little over the top, but by investing enough effort into validating all our info we can be sure that the color information you find on our website will always be verified and precise.
