New logo for logos – NCOS

Printers, designers and businesses will now be able to easily display their green credentials following the release of a new National Carbon Offset Standard (NCOS) logo this week.

Administered by the government’s Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, the NCOS logo was initially developed to help identify organisations that undertake voluntary carbon offset measures to achieve carbon neutrality.

However, until now, the existing NCOS logo has been too large to fit next to company logos on space-poor items such as company letterhead and business cards. The new logo, released on 14 February, slashes the required logo size from 25mm high down to around 12mm, freeing up space for other printed material.

According to Spicers Paper marketing manager, Edward Stephenson, whose company’s ENVI, Revive and Saxton paper ranges have all been approved for use of the logo, the re-design will encourage more paper customers, printers and designers to source and use carbon-neutral paper.

“This is great news for our clients,” says Stephenson. “The NCOS logo is a mark print purchasers want to use because of its government backing, however, right from the start we knew the size restrictions would cause issues. To have the logo available in a set of user-friendly sized means far more consumers can take advantage of the certification.”

Stephenson says that many of his company’s customers wanted to make use of its NCOS certified papers, but found that they were not able to apply the logo to a broad range of company stationery. However, with the new logo, there has been an increased interest in the use of eco-friendly papers.

“We had a lot of feedback from customers, people wanted to use the logo on their business cards, and if you’ve got a logo, that would take up half the business card,” says Stephenson. “On letterhead, the issue was that the NCOS logo was as big as the company’s own logo. They’re asking their graphic designers and printers to hunt down a paper they could use it on.”