What should be in your logo folder

The sign maker asks for a vector file. You go to the folder your designer sent, find a PNG, and forward it. They come back and say it will not work.

So you go looking for the original. The brand was built four years ago, the files went out over email at the time, and the person who filed them has since moved on. Three inboxes and two shared drives later, the only versions anyone can find are the ones already on the website. The quote to redraw your own logo from a low resolution image is four hundred pounds and a week you do not have, three days before the signage goes up.

This happens constantly, to good companies who paid good money to good designers. Almost nobody checks a handover at the time, because the logo looks right on the screen and there is no reason to think anything is missing until the day something needs printing.

Vector and raster, in one paragraph

There are two kinds of image file and the difference decides everything else.

Raster files are a grid of coloured pixels. A photograph is raster. Blow one up and you are stretching a fixed number of pixels across more space, so it goes soft and blocky. There is no more detail to reveal, because there was never any more detail.

Vector files are not pixels at all. They are a set of instructions describing shapes, curves and fills. Scale one to the size of a building and the maths simply recalculates. It stays razor sharp at any size, forever.

A logo should be born as a vector. Everything else is an export from it.

The formats, and what each one is actually for

AI (Adobe Illustrator). The native master file. Live text, layers, editable paths, colour swatches intact. This is not a file for sending to vendors or uploading anywhere. It sits in the archive and gets opened when the logo itself needs to change. You should still have a copy, because whoever holds it holds the ability to alter your brand.

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Vector for the web. Tiny file size, perfectly crisp on any screen at any resolution, and because it is code rather than an image it can be recoloured, animated or scaled without ever exporting anything again. This is what belongs on your website.

EPS (Encapsulated PostScript). The older print and vector exchange format. PDF has largely overtaken it in practice, but plenty of printers, sign makers, embroiderers and merchandise suppliers still list EPS on their spec sheet, so it stays in the pack.

PDF. In reality this is now the format most print suppliers actually want. Vector, universally readable, and it carries colour information reliably. If a vendor asks vaguely for a print-ready file, this is usually the answer.

PNG. Raster, but with transparency, so no white box sitting behind the logo. This is the everyday workhorse for anyone who just needs to drop the mark into a slide deck, a social profile or an email. Useful, and not a substitute for a vector.

JPEG. Raster, no transparency, and lossy, meaning it throws away data to shrink the file. What it throws away is detail around hard edges, which is what a logo is entirely made of. Nobody should choose JPEG for a logo. It gets included only because some platforms and forms will accept nothing else.

Formats are half of it. Variants are the other half.

This is where most handovers quietly fail, and it is the part clients rarely know to ask for.

One logo is not one file. It is a small system, and a proper pack covers the situations you will actually find yourself in.

• Primary lockup. The full version, used wherever there is room.
• Stacked and horizontal alternatives. Because a wide banner and a narrow sidebar are not the same shape.
• Icon or monogram only. For app icons, favicons, social avatars and anywhere the full name will not read.
• Mono black and mono white. For single colour printing, embroidery, engraving and any occasion where colour is not available.
• Light and dark background versions. A logo built for white will often disappear or fringe on black.
• Favicon and social profile crops, exported at the sizes those platforms actually use.

Then two things that get missed almost every time.

Text converted to outlines. If the wordmark is still live type, a printer without your licensed font will substitute something else, and you will not find out until proofs arrive.

Colour spaces. RGB for screen and CMYK for print, documented rather than guessed at. Send a screen file to a printer and you will get a colour that is close but not quite yours, which is worse than either. If you are moving into signage, vehicle livery or spot printing, a supplier will usually want a Pantone match as well, and that is a conversation worth having with them at the point you need it rather than in advance.

Why any of this is a commercial problem

Because the folder is not really about files. It is about whether you can act without asking permission.

With a proper pack, your printer, your sign maker, your web developer, your exhibition stand builder and whoever runs your social channels can each take what they need and get on with it. Nothing waits on anyone.

With one PNG, every single one of those jobs turns into a request, a delay and often a redraw. And because people are resourceful, what actually happens is somebody grabs the logo off your website, scales it up, and your brand appears slightly blurry on something expensive.

There is also the ownership question sitting underneath all of it, which is worth checking rather than assuming. Design work follows the same rules as photography. Unless copyright was assigned to you in writing, the studio that made it still owns it, and having the files is not the same as having the rights. We wrote about how that works here.

If your only file is a flattened export and you have no written assignment, you are not in a strong position. You have an image of a logo and no way to change it.

What we hand over

Every identity we build ships as a structured folder, not an email attachment.

Vector masters in AI, SVG, EPS and PDF. Raster exports in PNG and JPEG at the sizes people actually need. Every variant, primary through to favicon, in mono and full colour, for light and dark. Text outlined. Colour values documented in HEX, RGB and CMYK. A usage guide covering clear space, minimum sizes, the variants and when to reach for each one.

The rights are assigned to you in writing. The working files are yours. If you leave us in three years and take the brand to another studio, everything they need is already in the folder.

That last part costs us nothing and it is the whole point. A logo you cannot take with you was never really finished.

The sixty second check

Open your logo folder now.

Is there anything in it that is not a PNG or a JPEG? Is there a white version? Is there a version without the wordmark? Could you send it to a sign maker this afternoon without emailing anyone to ask?

If the answer to any of those is no, you do not have a complete logo. You have a picture of one, and at some point that is going to cost you a deadline.

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We build identities and hand over everything that comes with them. Talk to us about your brand and we will tell you what we would do and what it costs.