There’s no doubt that your brand logo is important. It’s one of the few omnipresent elements to your branding and because of this, it must be incredibly versatile. They need to: work in all kinds of applications; work in black and white as well as colour; and work in thumbnail formats.
If you haven’t covered all possible scenarios with your logo, then it can be time-consuming making adjustments and different versions. Unless your logo has been made as a vector.
There are some important benefits you get from vector graphics compared to raster graphics. And it’s these benefits that make vectors a must for logos.
Scalable
One of the main differences between vectors and rasters is that vectors are based on mathematical equations while rasters are illustrated via pixels. A diagonal line going from bottom-left to top-right, for example, is denoted by the equation ‘x=y’ in vectors while for rasters, you would have to physically draw this by colouring pixels in a diagonal line.
This means vector graphics are infinitely scalable without any pixellation concerns because they don’t have any pixels. Therefore, you don’t have to worry about the various applications your logo will be used in. This means you don’t need to make a bunch of versions to cover different use cases or sizes. One size fits all with vectors.
Flexible
Tastes change and brands evolve. This means your logo may not stay the same forever. But changing your logo every so often is incredibly time-consuming and costly. Unless you’ve made it as a vector.
As everything is denoted by mathematical equations and line paths, it’s much easier to make changes if you ever need to update your logo. You can simply adjust existing elements of your logo as opposed to redrawing it which is what you’d essentially have to do if you made it as a raster graphic.
Furthermore, brands are increasingly making spin-offs of their logo to support various campaigns and causes such as Pride. Again, you’ll find it much easier to make a new version of your logo in a vector format.
Lightweight
Vector files are incredibly lightweight compared to their pixellated cousins. As tonal information does not need to be held for each individual pixel (because there aren’t any), the file size is small regardless of how big you scale it.
This is especially important in digital applications where you want to keep your page sizes to a minimum so that site speed is decent and so Google doesn’t penalise your search ranking for sapping too much data from users. This is especially important with logos because they are used everywhere.
So as you can see, vector graphics are not just another file type. They work completely differently to the more common raster graphic and should be used in several specific applications such as logos. If your logo hasn’t been made as a vector, it’s worth doing it now to save you the hassle in the future.
For more help designing your next logo or reworking your current one, check out this list of logo design software that will work with our vectors.
How to search for vector graphics