Logo

A logo is the mark that identifies a business at a glance. It is usually the name set in a particular way, a symbol, or the two together, and its job is recognition rather than explanation. It does not have to say what you sell, and the attempts to make it do so are where most logo projects go wrong.

In short

• A logo identifies the business. It does not explain what the business does.
• Recognition comes from repetition, not from the design being clever.
• The vector file is the asset. Every other file is exported from it.
• A mark that survives at the size of a browser tab survives everywhere else.

What a logo is for

The job is identification, and identification is a much smaller job than most businesses expect from the artwork.

A mark works because it appears next to your business over and over until the two become the same thing in somebody’s head. That is the whole mechanism. Nothing in the shape itself carries meaning at the start, and the meaning it gathers later is whatever the business earned in the meantime. The marks everybody recognises are mostly abstract or arbitrary, and they arrived at recognition through years of exposure, not through being descriptive.

This has one practical consequence. A logo cannot make an unknown business known. It can only make a known business recognisable, which is a real benefit and a different one. If nobody has heard of you yet, the artwork is not the constraint, and the work that moves brand awareness sits elsewhere.

The same reasoning settles an argument that consumes weeks inside some businesses. People ask whether the mark represents the company well enough, and the honest answer is that a mark cannot represent anything on its own. A brand is what customers believe about you after dealing with you. The logo is the label they file that belief under. Getting the label wrong is possible and awkward to undo. Expecting the label to create the belief is the mistake that turns a two week job into a six month one.

The three ways a mark is built

Almost every logo is one of three constructions.

• A wordmark. The name itself, set in a chosen typeface and adjusted by hand. Suits a business with a short, distinctive name.
• A symbol. A shape carrying no words at all. It only functions once people already connect it to you, which takes years and a great deal of exposure.
• A combination. The symbol and the name locked together, with a stated rule for the few places the symbol may appear alone.

Most small and medium businesses belong in the third group and want to be in the second. A symbol alone is the ambition because the famous examples are symbols, and the famous examples spent decades and enormous sums arriving there. Until a customer can see the shape and name the company, the shape needs the name attached to it.

The files, and why the vector one is the asset

A logo is not an image file. It is a drawing, and the drawing lives in a vector file that can be reproduced at any size.

• Vector. SVG, PDF, AI or EPS. Stored as coordinates, so it prints on a signboard as cleanly as it appears on a screen. This is the source.
• Raster. PNG, JPG or WEBP. Stored as pixels at one fixed size. Fine for a website and unusable for a printer at anything larger.
• Transparent exports. PNG versions at several sizes, which is what most suppliers and platforms ask for.
• A one-colour version. Solid black and solid white, for the places colour is not available.

The common disaster is a business holding nothing but a small PNG, lifted from an old website or a screenshot, because nobody asked the original designer for the source and that designer is no longer reachable. Everything after that point is a redraw. Keep the vector file somewhere the business controls, listed in your brand guidelines alongside the colour values.

Typefaces deserve a line of their own. A wordmark drawn in a licensed typeface should be converted to outlines inside the source file, so the artwork stops depending on that font being installed wherever somebody opens it. Businesses find this out on the day a printer opens the file, holds no licence for the typeface, substitutes something close, and returns a proof in which the company name is subtly the wrong shape.

Where a mark has to survive

A logo lives in far more places than the top of a website, and most of those places are hostile to detail.

• A browser tab. The favicon is a tiny square. Fine detail vanishes completely at that size.
• A profile picture. Most platforms crop to a circle, which removes the corners and often the end of a horizontal wordmark.
• A single colour. Stamps, receipts, embroidery, engraving and etched signage have no gradients and frequently no second colour.
• A dark background. Dark artwork saved on transparency disappears when a mail app or an operating system inverts the surroundings.
• Distance. Vehicle livery and shopfront signage are read from across a road, at an angle, in bright sun.

Two tests catch nearly all of it before anybody spends money. Print the mark at the size of a fingernail and see whether it still reads. Then convert it to grey and check that it holds together without colour doing the work.

Asking for one and what to ask for

Commission the deliverables rather than the picture, because the picture is the part that arrives regardless.

• The vector source file, not only exports from it
• Transparent PNG exports at three or four sizes
• A one-colour version in black and in white
• The exact colour values for screen and for print
• A minimum size and a clear space rule
• A square variant built for circular profile crops

Settle ownership and usage in writing before the work starts. Then leave the result alone. Every year the mark stays the same adds recognition you did not have to pay attention to, and a redesign spends all of it at once in exchange for something that feels newer to the four people who look at it daily.

Words you will hear

• Wordmark. A logo built from the name itself, with no symbol involved.
• Lockup. The fixed arrangement of symbol and name, with the spacing between them treated as part of the artwork.
• Clear space. The minimum empty margin required around the mark.
• Vector. Artwork stored as coordinates, so it scales without softening.
• Favicon. The small square version shown in a browser tab and in bookmarks.

The mark is the cheapest part of an identity to get right and the most expensive to keep changing. Get the files, write down the rules, put it on everything, and then let it accumulate the recognition that is the only thing a logo has ever been able to offer.