Keep in mind just because it doesn't have a direct translation - you can often times take a great color version and with a bit of thought make it work.

The reason for it is that if you're creating a 'brand' an 'identity' you want it to look the same everywhere, or at least be recognizable quickly.

So if you have a great web logo, that's good - but when it's on a box or a sign, or a letterhead or ... it's a problem. Think of the Coke logo - it's the same everywhere. McDonald's has those arches for a reason - you see that shape you know it from a mile off. Apple? Same thing. It's just a branding trick.

If you have Adobe illustrator a quick and dirty trick (which also converts it to vector art) is to take your image into AI, and then do an image trace - set it for SketchArt or Black and White Silhouette. If it doesn't look good like that - play around with it first in greyscale, and then see if you can make a version that does. Saves a ton of time if you're doing logos.

Also... keep in mind the fonts you're using are ... often not free. In fact, they're almost ALWAYS not actually free for commercial use. So get the name of the font used. In almost every case, even if they're open source or from a 'free font' site - that's only for non-commercial use. When they go to use that logo, then someone will need to contact the font source owner and get the rights. Font rights are generally really cheap - but if you don't obtain them before commercial use, they charge a lot.

I'll dig up the font - someplace around I should have it in my notes from when we were doing the logos a while back. I tried to make a point of writing down the ones everyone used.

A very fun trick for making a font 'your own' is to basically design your logo, then bring it into AI and using the Image trace function render it as an vector -- then edit it by literally reshaping what you want and don't want.

Here's one technique to edit a font and change it's shape - in this case it's more to make it have swirlies, but you get the idea. You can easily make it do pretty much anything you want.

[url]http://www.creativepro.com/article/tug-and-twirl-text-illustrator[/url]

The real advantage to doing this is you can take an existing font - which may be 80-90% of where you want it stylistically, and then add whatever ornate fun you want. Another advantage of this is that once the font is in a transformed state, you can do all kinds of things with it you'd never get away with as a font.

You can do a lot of this now with the more recent versions of Photoshop (CS5-CC) but in a lot of ways Illustrator is still the fastest and easiest to use for this. I'll usually take it from Photoshop into AI, and then back into Photoshop.

Fun with poster fonts:
[url]http://abduzeedo.com/photoshop-battle-poster-illustrator[/url]
[url]http://vector.tutsplus.com/tutorials/text-effects/how-to-add-decorative-glamour-to-your-ordinary-script-font/[/url]
[img]http://www.noupe.com/wp-content/uploads/trans/wp-content/uploads/images/illustrator-text-tutorials/illustratortut15.jpg[/img]
[url]http://layersmagazine.com/create-fun-eye-catching-text-with-adobe-illustrator.html[/url]