Logo formats and files, and what belongs in the folder

Vector is the master, always

The mark is drawn once, as outlines, at no particular size. Everything else in the folder is generated from that file, which means the master is the only thing that has to be maintained and the only thing that must never be edited by anyone downstream.

Two rules on the master. Text must be converted to outlines, or the file depends on a font being installed on whatever machine opens it. And the artwork must be trimmed to the mark itself rather than carrying an artboard of empty space, because that empty space becomes unpredictable padding everywhere it is placed.

SVG is the delivery format for everything on a screen

An SVG is resolution-independent, usually smaller than a raster equivalent, and can be styled by the page it sits in. For a mark of ordinary complexity it will be a few kilobytes.

Three things go wrong with SVG delivery, and all three are avoidable.

• Editor metadata. Files exported from a drawing application carry a large block of application-specific data. Run the file through a cleaner before it ships; it frequently halves.
• Missing viewBox. Without one the file cannot scale. It is by some distance the commonest defect in a delivered SVG.
• Hard-coded fill. A mark that will need to appear in one colour on different backgrounds should have a variant whose fill can be set by the page rather than baked in.

PNG, and why not JPEG

PNG supports transparency and compresses flat colour without artefacts. JPEG supports neither: it has no alpha channel, so a mark exported as JPEG arrives with a white box around it, and its compression puts visible noise around every hard edge, which is what a logo is entirely made of.

Export PNGs at the sizes that will actually be used, and at twice those sizes for high-density screens. Exporting one enormous PNG and letting every downstream tool resize it is how a mark ends up soft in half the places it appears.

WebP and AVIF are both better than PNG on file size and both support transparency. They are a sensible addition to the folder and a poor replacement for it, because the folder has to be openable by whoever receives it in five years.

The favicon set

The browser tab is where the sixteen-pixel test stops being hypothetical. A working set is small: an .ico containing the 16 and 32 pixel versions, an SVG for browsers that take one, and a 180-pixel PNG for the touch icon. Anything beyond that is usually generated by a tool and rarely requested by a browser.

Use the reduced variant here, not the full mark. A mark with a wordmark in it renders at sixteen pixels as a smear.

One-colour, positive and negative

Two files, and they are the ones that get used in the situations nobody planned for: a fax, a newspaper, an embroidered shirt, an etched panel, a sponsor board. If they are not in the folder, somebody will make them badly under time pressure.

The usage note is the item that actually protects the mark

One page. Minimum size, clear space, what may not be done, and the two or three backgrounds it is approved on. It does not need to be a brand manual and it should not try to be one: a fifty-page document does not get read, and a single page does.

Clear space is best specified relative to the mark itself (a measure taken from part of the mark, such as the height of its counter) so the rule scales instead of being a number that only works at one size.

The commonest single cause of a mark degrading in its first year is not misuse. It is that somebody needed a version that was not in the folder, made one, and that version then circulated.

What does not belong in the folder

Editable text. Effects that only exist in one application. A version with a drop shadow baked in. Any file whose name does not say what it is. And any font file, unless the licence explicitly permits passing it on, which most do not, and which is covered in full under font licensing.