One thing that has come up a lot for us lately and that we’ve touched on partially before, in our post Logos – Importance of a High Quality Logo, is the importance of vector graphics.  Your logo is something that people see everywhere to represent you, so you want it to look the best, right?  So why would you only have a bad copy of it as the only copy you have?  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve needed a bunch of logos for different companies for projects and left sourcing out a logo online or if they email me something it’s a file that’s been copied, copied and copied and is now such poor quality.

A quick side note about jpg files, did you know that if you continue to copy a jpg over and over it degrades the quality of the file?  You’d think it would be exactly the same, but the more it’s copied the more data about the image it looses and thus the quality of the image degrades as well.  So make sure if you’re using a jpg version of any company logos, images, etc, that you either make a fresh jpg from your original vector file, or have an “original” jpg file that you always make copies from – don’t copy, copy, copy!

So what’s the difference between a jpg (or gif, etc) and a vector file?  Jpg’s, gif’s and some other file types as well are made up of tons of little boxes of colour, whereas a vector image is based off of shapes.  An example from an image we used on our quality logos post, jpg represented on left and vector on right zoomed in:

The big difference here is if you enlarge a pixel image file the quality degrades, but if you enlarge a vector based image the quality remains unchanged.  So if you have someone call you up and need your logo for a big banner or other large format use all you’d have to do is send them the vector version of your logo and you’re set.  You’ll always know what the logo will look like and you can be confident that the quality will be what you want.

So what if you have an old logo that’s been with your company for years and years and all you have is the copied and re-copied bad quality jpg file?  Talk to your graphic designer and ask if they can make a vector version of your logo for you.  They should be able to remake the logo into a nice high-quality, crisp vector based file.  This is a service we offer to those that need it and it doesn’t even take that long to do, generally.  We love making sure our clients always have great quality images because it make us look good too!  Another place that you might be able to find a quality version of your logo is if you have been using the same printer for years and years – it’s possible that they have a vector version of your logo, and if not may at least have a nice high quality version.

So the next time that you have to provide your logo to someone make sure you’re sending a high quality image – and if possible send them a vector version!  If you don’t really know anything about image files just remember jpg, gif and most png files are pixel images, and vector files are generally eps, or ai but there are many other formats as well (wmf, some pdf files, and MANY more).

Tags: image file formats, Logos, pixel, pixel image formats, pixel images, Vector, vector image formats, vector logo