Tradie logo design, built for the ute, the shirt and the invoice.
We connect Australian trade businesses with an experienced Australian brand design studio. A trade logo gets judged on 4 surfaces before anybody sees your workmanship, and every one of those surfaces is made by a different supplier with limits a screen never shows you.
Tradie logo design is the job of making 1 mark work on a moving vehicle, an embroidered shirt, a site board and a black-and-white invoice, which is 4 different production processes with 4 different limits. The signwriter’s rule of thumb is roughly 25mm of capital letter height for every 3 metres of reading distance, so a name that is legible across a driveway is not automatically legible across a street. We are a referral service, not a design studio.
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A trade logo is a manufacturing spec, not a picture.
Most branding advice is written for businesses whose identity lives on a website and a set of slides. A trade business is the opposite case. The mark spends its working life on painted steel, on woven fabric, on weathered corflute and in the header of a document printed in black on an office machine. None of those are screens, and each one destroys a different kind of detail.
That inverts the usual order of decisions. Instead of designing something and then working out how to apply it, the useful sequence is to list every surface the mark has to appear on, find out what each of those suppliers can actually produce, and design inside the tightest of those limits. A logo drawn that way looks simpler than one drawn on a screen. It also survives contact with a plotter, an embroidery machine and a printer, which the clever one usually does not.
The practical version of that discipline is what the rest of this page covers: how far away the name has to be readable, what each supplier will and will not accept, why the single-colour version matters more than the colour one, and what a rollout is actually made of once you separate the design from the fabrication. If you want the wider view of what a full identity involves beyond the trades, brand design covers the whole scope, and logo design services covers the mark on its own.
The distance test, and the arithmetic behind it
Signwriters work to a rule of thumb: roughly 25mm of capital letter height for every 3 metres of reading distance. That is 8.33mm of height per metre. The table below applies that figure and rounds each result up to the nearest 5mm, so you can reproduce every row yourself. Measure the distance people actually read your vehicle from, find the closest row, and you have the minimum height your business name should be set at.
| Reading distance | Minimum capital height | What that situation looks like |
|---|---|---|
| 3 m | 25 mm | A customer standing at the open door of your ute, reading the phone number off the panel. |
| 6 m | 50 mm | The vehicle parked in a driveway, read from the front door of the house. |
| 10 m | 85 mm | Across a front yard, or a trailer parked on the nature strip. |
| 15 m | 130 mm | Across a 2-lane suburban street, stationary and unobstructed. |
| 25 m | 210 mm | A site fence board read from the opposite footpath. |
| 40 m | 335 mm | A truck or trailer read from the car behind it in moving traffic, which is the hardest case on this table. |
Treat this as a floor rather than a target, and read it with 3 caveats. It is a rule of thumb rather than a standard, so your signwriter will have their own version of it and theirs beats ours. It assumes a clean typeface, strong contrast and a stationary reader, so a moving vehicle, a dusty panel or a mid-tone colour on a mid-tone background all need more height than the table gives. And it applies to the business name and the phone number, which are the 2 things anyone is actually trying to read. The rest of the artwork can be smaller.
The most common and most expensive mistake on a vehicle is the opposite of what people expect. It is not a logo that is too small. It is a layout with 7 things on it, a list of services down the side, a licence number, 2 social handles and a slogan, none of which can be read at 15 metres because the panel is full. Take things off until the name and the number pass the table.
6 surfaces, 6 sets of production limits
Each row below is a place your mark ends up, who physically makes it, and the question to settle with that supplier before the logo is signed off rather than after. Getting these answers first costs you an email each. Getting them afterwards costs a redraw.
| Surface | How it is made | Settle this with the supplier first |
|---|---|---|
| Ute door, tailgate, van flank | Cut vinyl lettering, or a printed and laminated decal | The finest stroke their plotter can cut and weed cleanly, and whether a door handle, body line or window rubber runs through the artwork area. |
| Hi-vis polo, jumper, cap | Machine embroidery, digitised from your artwork by their operator | The minimum text height and stroke width their digitiser will accept, how many thread colours the quoted price includes, and where the reflective tape sits so the logo is not placed under it. |
| Site board, fence banner, A-frame | Large-format print on corflute, ACM composite or mesh | The finished sheet size, the reading distance it is installed at, and how your colours actually print on that substrate rather than on paper. |
| Quote, invoice, variation, safety documents | An office printer, often in mono, and read on a phone as a PDF | That you have a single-colour version, and that it survives being set into a document header only 15mm to 20mm deep. |
| Google Business Profile, social, app icon | Screen only, cropped by someone else to a square or a circle | That a compact mark exists for when the horizontal lockup gets cropped away. A wide logo with the name beside it does not survive a circular crop. |
| Hard hat, toolbox and helmet stickers | Small die-cut vinyl, applied to a curved surface | The smallest element their cutter can hold, and whether the mark still reads once it wraps around a curve. |
There is a consequence of that list worth stating on its own, because it surprises people: your colours will not match across those surfaces. Cut vinyl comes from a fixed range of manufactured film colours, embroidery thread comes from a different fixed range again, and large-format printing mixes its own. Nobody can hit an identical colour in all 3. What a designer can do is nominate the closest available match in each medium and write those references down, which is one of the few genuinely useful things a short set of brand guidelines does for a trade business. Without it, every new supplier guesses, and 3 years later your fleet is 3 slightly different greens.
Uniforms: the setup charge people forget
Embroidery does not use your logo file. A digitiser converts it into stitch data, which is a separate one-off charge, and it is charged per logo and broadly per size, because a chest logo and a back logo are 2 different stitch files. That has a consequence worth planning around: the digitising is cheap-ish once and annoying repeatedly, so settle the artwork before the first run rather than tweaking it a year later when you reorder.
The garments themselves are the recurring cost, not the branding. Staff turn over, shirts wear out, and hi-vis gets destroyed faster than anything else in the business. When you are working out whether the uniform side is worth it, price the ongoing garment line rather than the one-off setup, because that is the number you will be paying every year.
The paperwork nobody thinks to design
A quote, an invoice, a variation form and a job completion sheet are read more carefully by your customer than anything else you produce. They are also the documents most trade businesses leave at whatever the software default was. This is the cheapest part of a rollout and usually the most immediately useful, because it lands at the exact moment somebody is comparing you with 2 other quotes and has nothing else to go on.
What makes a document template work is not decoration. It is that the scope is broken into readable lines instead of a single block, that inclusions and exclusions are visibly separated, and that the total is easy to find. Ask for the templates as part of the same brief as the logo rather than as a second project, and check first what your accounting or job-management software will actually let you change, because some of them will only accept a logo and a colour. Ongoing document and collateral work sits under graphic design services once the identity itself is settled.
What a trade rollout is actually made of
The single most useful thing to understand before you get quotes is that this is not 1 purchase. It is a design purchase and several manufacturing purchases, from different businesses, on different timelines. The table below separates them. We publish no dollar figures for the fabrication lines, because those prices come from a signwriter, a uniform supplier and a printer rather than from us, and quotes for the same job in the same suburb differ enough that a published band would mislead you.
| Line item | Who you pay | One-off or recurring | What moves it |
|---|---|---|---|
| The mark and its core file set | Brand designer | One-off | How many concept directions are presented, how many revision rounds are included, and which file formats you are handed at the end. |
| Vehicle artwork, per vehicle shape | Brand designer | One-off per shape, reused per vehicle | The number of genuinely different vehicle shapes. A second identical ute costs nothing extra in artwork. A van, a truck and a trailer are 3 separate layouts. |
| Signwriting or wrapping, per vehicle | Signwriter or vehicle wrapper | Per vehicle, and again on replacement | Cut lettering against a partial or full wrap, the size of the vehicle, and whether old graphics have to be removed first. |
| Embroidery digitising | Uniform supplier | One-off per logo, per size | It is a setup charge for converting artwork into stitch data. Change the logo, or add a noticeably different size, and it is charged again. |
| Garments | Uniform supplier | Recurring, forever | Headcount, turnover, how hard the work is on clothing, and whether the garments have to meet a hi-vis standard for the sites you work on. |
| Boards, banners and signage panels | Printer or sign fabricator | Per job, replaced as they weather | Sheet size, substrate, quantity, and whether anything needs installing rather than leaning against a fence. |
| Quote and invoice templates | Brand designer | One-off | How many documents, and whether they have to be rebuilt inside your accounting or job-management software rather than supplied as files. |
| Written brand guidelines | Brand designer | One-off, updated rarely | How many applications get specified. For a trade business the useful version is short and names the suppliers, colours and file locations. |
For an illustrative range on the design lines only, the branding cost calculator publishes its whole model on the page, including every figure and both adjustment factors, so you can see exactly how a number is arrived at. It is a planning aid and not a quote, and it deliberately does not attempt to price fabrication at all. If you want to know what separates a cheap logo from an expensive one before you compare anything, the guide to logo costs in Australia covers where the difference actually sits.
The order to do it in
Sequence matters here more than in most branding projects, because several of these steps are irreversible once a supplier has produced something. A workable order:
- Settle the mark, and get the single-colour version at the same time rather than later.
- Do the vehicle artwork next. It is the most visible surface and the most expensive to redo, and it will expose any problem in the mark immediately.
- Send the artwork to the uniform supplier for digitising before you order a single garment.
- Set up the quote and invoice templates. Cheap, fast, and in front of customers the same week.
- Boards, banners and stickers as jobs require them, using the file set you already have.
- Update the Google Business Profile and social profiles with the compact mark, not the wide one.
- Write the short guidelines last, once you know which colours and suppliers you actually ended up with.
If you are replacing an identity rather than starting from nothing, the sequencing question changes shape and the useful first step is an inventory of what is already out there. That is covered under brand refresh and rebranding. If you are not sure whether what you have is worth keeping, the brand audit checklist is a free way to score it before you spend anything. And if your work is in Western Australia, where the mark often has to satisfy a procurement team as well as a homeowner, the notes on branding in Perth cover that side of it.
Keep exploring
Restaurant and cafe branding
The other sector where production limits drive the design, for entirely different reasons.
Logo design services
The parent page: what the mark itself involves, what you receive, and what changes the price.
Branding cost calculator
Every figure and factor published on the page. Free, and no enquiry required.
What happens after you send the form.
You send the brief
Fill in the quote form with what you need, roughly when you need it, and any budget you have in mind. It takes under 2 minutes and there is no call.
It goes to a brand designer
Your enquiry is passed to an experienced Australian brand design studio. We do not do design work ourselves and we do not employ designers.
They quote on your actual brief
You get a price written against what you asked for, not a package guess. From there you deal with the designer directly. We aim to respond within 1 business day.
Branding Services Australia is a lead generation and referral service. It does not employ designers directly and does not perform design work. Read how the referral works in full.
Tradie branding - common questions
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