You’ve got a logo and need some graphic design work done…

You need to design your new website, a brochure, whatever is at the top of your marketing priority list. The first thing your graphic designer asks for is your logo in ‘vector’ format – what the heck is vector format, you ask? To put it simply, vector artwork consists of lines and curves, while most graphic file types you might be familiar with – such as .png, .gif, .jpg, .bmp or .tif – are all ‘bitmap’ images which consist of small squares or ‘pixels’ of color to make up the image.

Always ask your graphic designer for vector artwork!

The original artwork files for your logo should be vector format – be sure to ask for the original files, even though you may not be able to open them or do anything with them! These will give your graphic designer the information they need about colors in addition to the flexibility to quickly and easily create the file types required for various projects. In addition to the original artwork files, which will typically have .ai (Adobe Illustrator) or .cdr (CorelDraw) file extensions, you should request a .eps file of your logo artwork – the .eps file will be compatible with more software applications.

Examples of vector artwork compared to bitmap artwork

Here is an example of vector art on the left and bitmap on the right – at this size the quality difference is not very noticeable (but the white background is obvious and annoying!):

When I zoom in you can really see the difference – starting with the vector art will always help your graphic designer create the cleanest possible image for your logo. Vector art is also a requirement for many promotional products and gives you the best results for screen printing, embroidery and other imprinting methods.

When we create a new logo for a client, we always provide a logo specification including the colors used (and their RGB, CMYK and web equivalents) and the names of any fonts used along with our Graphic File Types Guide, in addition to all of the graphic file types you may need for future projects.

Rule of thumb for resizing vector and bitmap graphic files

Bitmap images can be scaled down in size, but not up (without losing resolution/clarity). Vector files are (or should be if they are created correctly) scalable either way.