When you start your business, one of the first things you think about is your logo. Through your logo, your business makes its first impression. It’s on everything. From your store signage to business cards and invoices, it’s everywhere.
Now, as Ellen mentioned in last week’s T3, it’s important to make sure your logo is up to date. But it’s equally important to have your logo in saved appropriate file types for all your business-related items. Your logo needs to be created in a vector based program such as Adobe Illustrator® and saved as an .eps or .ai file. These are vector files. Vector files allow your logo to maintain crisp, clear lines as it increases in size. In addition, all type in your logo MUST be saved as outlines. Saving all type as outlines essentially turns the type into an illustration, so you can read and manipulate it even if you don’t have that font in your system.
Yes, it’s true that there are times when you need a rasterized version of your logo. These are typically .jpg’s or .png's to use in word-processing programs, on invoice software, or on the Internet. Those file types can be exported out of Adobe Illustrator or other vector program after their initial creation.
It’s important to keep a copy of both vector and rasterized versions of your logo. Once your vector logo is lost, there’s no going back. A rasterized file cannot be taken into a vector program to be saved as an .eps file correctly. Sure, you can open raster files in Adobe Illustrator, but it doesn’t magically make it into an illustration. It has to be redrawn or completely recreated, and at that point, it will not retain its former quality.
So please, for your friendly neighborhood designer, keep those files. We know that you can’t open them on your computer if it doesn’t have the correct software, but we can. It will help your keep your company’s branding looking its best.
