What is a Vector Logo and Why You Need It?

Choosing the best brand logo is crucial for business success; that’s something we all relate to. However, to be able to create the best logo for the branding purpose of your business, it’s equally essential to choose the right logo format.

Since most business owners aren’t well-versed with the different types of logo file formats, choosing the right one is often hard and challenging. Without adequate knowledge, it’s easy for you to get stuck, sidetracked, and make wrong decisions.

Well, fortunately, business owners don’t really have to get introduced to all different logo formats, since a vector logo will suffice in almost all situations.

Wait, what’s a vector logo and why do businesses need it?

Well, in the sections below, we will be introducing you to vector format and why they are considered the best format for business logos?

What is a Vector Logo?

Speaking broadly, there are two major types of image formats; namely vector and raster. Most of us are familiar with raster formats like .jpg, .png .pdf, and others. These are widely used over the internet and for various purposes. However, the raster format comes with a significant inherent limitation – its resolution.

Raster images are made up of tiny pixels, which have definite geometry (size and shape). This means that when stretched or contracted out of proportion, these raster images lose their aspect ratio resulting in blurred imagery.  

Contrary to raster files, vector files are made up of mathematical lines, curves, and shapes. This means that these files are free from shape distortion; irrespective of the amount of stretch or contraction. Since you can reshape or resize vector files as and when required, these can easily be edited without messing.

Given the special editable features of vector files, professional designers always prefer vector format for business logos, since these are scalable and more convenient to resize.

What are the Common Vector Logo Formats?

Ok, now that you know the difference between vector and raster files and why vector logo is preferred by businesses, let’s take a quick look at the different types of vector graphics available.

Broadly speaking, there are multiple types of vector graphics used widely in the industry. Each type comes with its unique features and attributes; especially concerning editability, compatibility, and quality.

Some of the most commonly used vector logo formats include:

• AI (Adobe Illustrator Artwork)
• EPS (Encapsulated PostScript)
• SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic)
• PDF (Portable Document Format)

Why You Need a Vector Logo?

Business logos are considered the face of the company. These are used across all sorts of formal, informal, and marketing merchandize including, letterhead, email, promotional merchandize, and much more.

This means that you need a format that can easily adjust various shapes and sizes without getting blurred or distorted. That’s exactly where vector format delivers. It consists of mathematical shapes and lines that can be reshaped and resized as required without losing any detail or aesthetics.

Let’s now see what makes vector art the perfect format for business logos.

Scalability

As mentioned in the above sections, scalability is the single more differentiating feature of vector formats. As a business owner, you can scale vector logos as and when you want without compromising on the quality and aesthetics of the logo. In fact, irrespective of the scale of zoom, the logo will remain sharp and crisp to be used on any business merchandize.

So, whether you want to add a logo on the billboards or letterhead, posters, cards or promotional merchandize (t-shirts, jackets, towels, calendars, etc.) vector logos will give you the best results every time. Also, with the vector logo, you have more control to make any necessary changes in the design required at the later stage.

Flexibility

Another great feature that makes vector logos a great choice for businesses is their flexibility. You can easily import a vector logo into any file format of your choice, including PDF, SVG, AI, and SVG. To add even more versatility, you can also import vector logos into preferred raster formats like TIFF, PNG, JPG, GIF, and others.

With this level of flexibility, designers have greater freedom to send the package to the clients in their desired formats. Since there are more applications/programs available on mobile and desktop to view raster formats, business owners like to receive the logos in raster format for reviewing purposes. Whereas, they can easily suggest possible changes to the designer, who subsequently will be able to incorporate those changes in the vector format, before sending them back for review.

Editable

Vector logos aren’t just easy to scale, these are also highly convenient for editing purposes. This is especially important for designers when dealing with hard clients or working on tight deadlines.

As a crucial business component, it is only expected for a business logo to have multiple revisions before the design is finalized. Thereby, designers prefer to create multiple versions of business logos in vector formats, which makes it easier for them to make timely edits as and when required.

For instance, in Adobe Illustrator, it’s extremely convenient for designers to change the color or elements of the logo in no time. Similarly, you can make various other corrections to the original file as requested by the client.

Non-Resolution Dependent

As mentioned above, vector formats aren’t bounded by any definite geometry like raster formats (which are bounded by pixel dimensions). This means that vector logos won’t have any inherent resolution to start with and will be able to adapt to the resolution of the device they are displayed. This is a great feat. In today’s mobile-centric business landscape where customers used varying sized devices to access the website and other business documents.

Smaller Files

Last but not least, vector files are intrinsically smaller as compared to the raster files. In the case of raster images, there are millions of pixels in each image with each pixel having its X and Y coordinates, and color value. All this information has to be stored in memory and retrieved on call.

However, in the case of vector files, there is no such information, and that it can be saved and retrieved quite efficiently, not only saving on disk space but also improving the efficiency of the process.