Logo file formats, explained once so you never have to ask

Every founder eventually receives a folder with forty files and no idea which one to send anybody. Here is the whole thing in one page.

The two families

Vector files store shapes as maths, so they scale to any size with no loss. Raster files store a grid of pixels, so they blur when enlarged. Your master logo must be vector. Everything else is exported from it.

What each format is for

• SVG — vector, for the web. Small, sharp on any screen, and it can inherit colour from CSS. This is what your developer wants. Ask for one with the text converted to outlines, otherwise it will render in a font the visitor does not have.
• EPS — vector, for print and older production workflows. This is what a printer, a sign maker or an embroiderer will ask for.
• PDF — vector, and the safest thing to email a stranger. Almost everyone can open it and it does not degrade.
• AI — the Illustrator working file. Keep it. You will need it the day you change anything.
• PNG — raster with transparency. For slides, documents, email signatures and anywhere a system will not accept a vector. Export a few widths — 400px, 1000px, 2000px — rather than resizing one badly.
• JPG — raster, no transparency. Only for photographs. A logo saved as JPG picks up grey artefacts around the edges.
• WEBP / AVIF — modern raster formats for the web, much smaller than PNG. Useful for photography; unnecessary for a logo, which should be SVG.
• ICO — the browser tab icon. Modern sites also want PNGs at 32px and 180px and an SVG. Make the favicon a simplified mark, not the full logo: at 16 pixels a wordmark is a grey smudge.

The colour variants you actually need

Full colour, one-colour black, one-colour white (for dark backgrounds), and a horizontal plus a stacked arrangement. That is eight to ten files and it covers nearly every request you will ever receive.

How to name them so you can find them

Something like kuestenkurs-logo-horizontal-black.svg. Brand, asset, arrangement, colour, extension. Sort order then does the organising for you, and anyone can pick the right file without asking.

One rule

Never let a raster file become the master. If someone asks for "the logo" and the only thing you can find is a PNG from a slide deck, you have already lost the original — and every future use will be a copy of a copy.