Logo Formating
Budget: $30 – $250 USD
Hello, I would like to someone to provide a wide variety of formats for my current logo. Please see my requirements below and please visit this site for more information on what I am looking for: https://logosbynick.com/logo-files-for-clients/
Full Lockup - This is the complete logo design, with both the icon and the text next to it.
Iconic Mark - Standalone icon, A good example of this would be for use as an avatar on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. The profile pictures on most social platforms are formatted to be a symmetrical square, meaning a horizontally-oriented logo design (like our example) won’t fit very well. The dimensions will force it into a compact size that’ll hardly be legible (especially on a mobile device) and there will be unsightly blank space on the top and bottom.
Wordmark - The standalone text will probably be the least used variation of a logo, but it’s still useful to have copies of it regardless. Sometimes a logo needs to fit a very stealthy design context where it is present, but tucked away so some other design element can stand out and take priority. Using a simple wordmark variation of the logo can help achieve this.
Favicon - A website favicon is the little icon that appears on the browser tab of a website. It’s 16 x 16 pixels in size and rendered in .ico format (GIMP does a great job of exporting to this format.)
Color variations - Full color, inverted, and monotone
Logo File Extensions
SVG – A true vector format that can be edited with Inkscape, Illustrator, CorelDraw, or any other vector graphics application.
AI – Another true vector format, only it is proprietary to Adobe, so it can really only used with Illustrator. It’s good to have a copy of this though because print shops will often request Illustrator files to work with when prepping something for print.
EPS – This is another editable format. It’s not necessarily a true vector format, but it is editable with any vector graphics application, and some people prefer to work with it, so I like to include an EPS copy with my logo files for clients as well.
PDF – Another editable file that works very similarly to Adobe Illustrator format. The benefit with PDF though is that it’s not proprietary, meaning it can work with any vector graphics software.
PSD (Optional) – This is a layered Photoshop file. I don’t normally include PSD copies, but sometimes clients request them because they’re very familiar with Photoshop (or GIMP) and would rather use that to alter the designs when needed.
PNG – First and foremost, you’ll want to provide PNG file with a transparent background. This will likely be the file that your client uses the most. PNGs can be directly uploaded to a website for use as a logo, and since they have a transparent background, they’ll lay nicely on top of whatever color, pattern, image or video is being used as the background. You can see this in action on my professional logo design portfolio page, where the background image at the top of the page shows through the negative space of the logo.
JPG – This is somewhat of a useless format in my opinion, because it doesn’t provide support for alpha channels, meaning no transparent backgrounds. The background will usually default to white (unless you specify a color or some other fill.) However, sometimes your client will need to upload their logo someplace where they (for whatever reason) accept JPG files, but not PNGs, so it’s still a good logo file for clients to have copies of. There’s also an added benefit in that JPG files tend to be more compressed and take up less disk space than their PNG counterparts.
ICO – The final format is ICO, used primarily for favicons, as discussed earlier.
Various logo sizes to include make the document size 1920 pixels, but the icon size 1700 pixels with padding.
Full Lockup - This is the complete logo design, with both the icon and the text next to it.
Iconic Mark - Standalone icon, A good example of this would be for use as an avatar on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. The profile pictures on most social platforms are formatted to be a symmetrical square, meaning a horizontally-oriented logo design (like our example) won’t fit very well. The dimensions will force it into a compact size that’ll hardly be legible (especially on a mobile device) and there will be unsightly blank space on the top and bottom.
Wordmark - The standalone text will probably be the least used variation of a logo, but it’s still useful to have copies of it regardless. Sometimes a logo needs to fit a very stealthy design context where it is present, but tucked away so some other design element can stand out and take priority. Using a simple wordmark variation of the logo can help achieve this.
Favicon - A website favicon is the little icon that appears on the browser tab of a website. It’s 16 x 16 pixels in size and rendered in .ico format (GIMP does a great job of exporting to this format.)
Color variations - Full color, inverted, and monotone
Logo File Extensions
SVG – A true vector format that can be edited with Inkscape, Illustrator, CorelDraw, or any other vector graphics application.
AI – Another true vector format, only it is proprietary to Adobe, so it can really only used with Illustrator. It’s good to have a copy of this though because print shops will often request Illustrator files to work with when prepping something for print.
EPS – This is another editable format. It’s not necessarily a true vector format, but it is editable with any vector graphics application, and some people prefer to work with it, so I like to include an EPS copy with my logo files for clients as well.
PDF – Another editable file that works very similarly to Adobe Illustrator format. The benefit with PDF though is that it’s not proprietary, meaning it can work with any vector graphics software.
PSD (Optional) – This is a layered Photoshop file. I don’t normally include PSD copies, but sometimes clients request them because they’re very familiar with Photoshop (or GIMP) and would rather use that to alter the designs when needed.
PNG – First and foremost, you’ll want to provide PNG file with a transparent background. This will likely be the file that your client uses the most. PNGs can be directly uploaded to a website for use as a logo, and since they have a transparent background, they’ll lay nicely on top of whatever color, pattern, image or video is being used as the background. You can see this in action on my professional logo design portfolio page, where the background image at the top of the page shows through the negative space of the logo.
JPG – This is somewhat of a useless format in my opinion, because it doesn’t provide support for alpha channels, meaning no transparent backgrounds. The background will usually default to white (unless you specify a color or some other fill.) However, sometimes your client will need to upload their logo someplace where they (for whatever reason) accept JPG files, but not PNGs, so it’s still a good logo file for clients to have copies of. There’s also an added benefit in that JPG files tend to be more compressed and take up less disk space than their PNG counterparts.
ICO – The final format is ICO, used primarily for favicons, as discussed earlier.
Various logo sizes to include make the document size 1920 pixels, but the icon size 1700 pixels with padding.