Logo file formats explained: what to ask for when your identity is delivered

A logo is not one file: it is a master vector everything else is derived from, and a picture in a chat is a copy, not the master.

The identity work is finished, the invoice is paid, and a folder arrives with more files than a small office needs. Most owners archive it untouched, use whatever screenshot a colleague forwards in chat, and discover at the print shop that their logo turns to mush on a banner. The delivery was complete; the handover was not.

Start with the file that carries the weight: the master vector. This is the source drawing the whole identity comes from, the version that scales from a browser tab icon to a building sign without losing a single edge, because it is described by geometry rather than by dots. Everything else you will ever need is an export of it. If the master is not in your folder, you do not own your logo; you are renting screenshots of it.

Alongside the master sit the exported raster files, the flat images built for screens and documents. These are what your website loads, what your invoices embed, what slides and social posts consume. They come in sizes, and the sizes matter: a small image stretched to fill a banner blurs the moment it leaves the chat window it arrived in. Treat these files as consumables made for places, not as the identity itself.

Then come the versions, and this is where handovers betray their owners. A mark that survives on white will not survive on a photograph, and a full-color logo that sings on screen can turn to mud in print, where ink behaves differently from light. You should be able to place your mark on dark, on light, and on paper, and recognize it every time. If the folder holds a single version, the identity was drawn for one background, which is to say it was drawn for none.

The acceptance test is physical and takes minutes. Open every file and confirm it actually opens. Place the mark on a dark slide and a light document and see whether it holds. Print one, on ordinary paper, at the size you actually use. A file that fails this test is a problem to raise now, while the designer still answers the phone, not next year when a supplier asks for the banner version and the folder has none.

This is the standard we hold our own studio work to at Bloom Techno: a master you own outright, exports for every place the mark will live, versions that keep their nerve on dark, light, and paper. We cannot stop a supplier from compressing whatever you send them, and we will not pretend file discipline is glamorous work. What we can say is that an identity delivered this way survives its first year of real use, and most do not.