What format should a logo be in? Sorted by where it is going

The question people actually ask is not "what is the best logo format" in the abstract. It is "what do I attach to this email" — to a printer, a developer, a T-shirt supplier, or a client who asked for "the logo files". The autocomplete for this phrase is full of send, share and for print, and those are all different answers.

So here is the answer sorted by destination, and then the reasoning.

The short answer, by where it is going

• To a printer, a sign maker or a merch supplier: vector — SVG, EPS, AI, or a PDF with the artwork still vector inside. Not a PNG.
• To a web developer: SVG, plus a PNG fallback.
• Into a website you are building yourself: SVG for the logo, WebP or PNG for anything raster.
• Into a Word document, a slide deck or an email signature: PNG.
• To a client, as "the logo files": a folder with all of the above, which is what they are really asking for.
• Almost never: JPG.

SVG is the master copy, and you cannot make one by converting

An SVG is not a picture. It is a set of instructions — this path, this curve, this fill colour — which the screen or the printer draws at whatever size it needs. That is why one SVG works as a 16-pixel favicon and as a three-metre trade-show banner. There are no pixels in it to run out of.

This is the part worth being blunt about: you cannot get an SVG out of a PNG. Not with our tools, and not really with anyone's. Automatic tracing will produce an SVG, but it is a guess at where the edges were, and on a logo — which is all edges — the guess is visible. Curves come back slightly lumpy, and the file is often larger than the PNG it came from.

If you do not have the SVG, the person who designed the logo does. Ask them for it before you ask for anything else. Everything below is what to do in the meantime.

PNG is the format you send when SVG is refused

Plenty of systems will not take an SVG: most e-commerce product uploaders, a lot of print portals, and every "upload your logo" box that expects a photo. PNG is the right answer there, for one reason — it is lossless and it supports real transparency, so the logo sits on whatever colour is behind it instead of arriving in a white box.

Send it larger than you think you need. Scaling a PNG down looks fine; scaling one up adds no detail, it just makes the existing pixels bigger and softer. 1000 px on the long edge is a reasonable export, 2000 px if it might get printed.

If you have the logo as a JPG and need transparency, converting it will not create any — JPG to PNG gives you a lossless PNG of the same picture, white background included. What it does give you is a file that will not degrade further each time it is re-saved.

JPG is the one to avoid

JPG is built for photographs. It discards detail in a way that is nearly invisible on skin and sky, and clearly visible on the hard edges a logo is made of — you get faint grey halos, called ringing, along every edge. It also has no transparency, so a logo saved as JPG arrives as a rectangle of white.

The exception is a lock-up that sits on a photographic background and will never be placed on anything else — rare enough that "not JPG" is a safe default. The full trade-off is in JPG vs PNG.

What a printer actually needs

Two things, and neither is resolution.

First, vector, so they can scale the artwork to the press without it softening. Second, colours specified the way their process uses them, and fonts converted to outlines so the file does not depend on a typeface their machine has never seen. Those are decisions only your printer can make for your job — send the vector file and ask, rather than guessing at colour profiles.

If all you have is a raster logo and the print is small — a business card, a stamp on a form — a high-resolution PNG can be fine. Work backwards from the physical size: inches multiplied by 300 gives you the pixels you need. A logo printed 2 inches wide wants about 600 px across. Below that it will look soft and there is no setting that fixes it.

WebP is for your own site, not for sending

WebP is genuinely smaller — usually around a third of the equivalent PNG for the same picture — and every current browser displays it. That makes PNG to WebP a sensible last step for a logo you are putting on your own web pages.

It is a poor choice for anything you hand to someone else — older desktop software and mail clients still refuse it. If someone sends you a WebP you need elsewhere, WebP to PNG keeps the transparency and WebP to JPG flattens it.

What to put in the folder for a client

"Send me the logo" almost always means "send me a set I can use for the next two years without coming back". A reasonable set:

• The SVG, full colour — the master.
• A PNG at around 2000 px on the long edge, transparent background.
• The same PNG at around 500 px, for documents and email.
• A square version for profile pictures, because most platforms crop to a square or a circle and a wide logo loses its ends.
• A one-colour version — solid black and solid white — for stamps, embroidery and anything printed in a single ink.

Two of those are mechanical. Crop to square handles the profile version, and crop to circle gives you one with transparent corners if you want the circle baked in. Both run in your browser and nothing is uploaded.

If the file is too big for the upload box

Logo files are usually small, but a large transparent PNG exported at 4000 px can land at several megabytes, and plenty of forms cap at 1 MB or less. Compress to 200 KB and 100 KB will get a PNG or JPG under a limit.

One caveat specific to logos: our compressor reaches a byte target partly by re-encoding as JPG, which flattens transparency onto white. If the transparent background matters, resize the PNG instead of compressing it, or accept the white box. There is more on what compression costs in does compressing a file reduce quality, and on the sizes themselves in how many KB a logo should be.

If the logo you have been given is stuck inside a PDF, PDF to PNG will get a raster copy out of it — though if that PDF holds vector artwork, it is worth asking for the source instead. The PDF may already be the master file you were told did not exist.