Get your brand respected: distribute vector logos

When we built Ellen’s website (www.physioellen.co.uk), she wanted to show her work accreditations as part of her professional details.

I wanted to avoid too much text to keep the whole page relatively light, so for this section, we decided to only display the logos of the physiotherapy societies she is a member of.

However, in order for those to render correctly on most screens, including on high density displays, I needed to find better versions than the logos those organisations use on their own websites.

Fortunately, they all had a brand management department, so I placed a request with each of them for either high resolution images, or better: vector files.

It turned out that for most of them, I could only get rasterised versions of their logos through the standard request process, and I had to insist quite a few times to obtain proper vector versions, in SVG or EPS format. But one of them simply refused entirely to give its logo as a vector file.

I have a feeling that it’s for fear of seeing vector images being modified that the process of obtaining higher quality images was hard in the first place, but for me, this is doing it the wrong way around.

While I can understand some caution is needed to ensure your brand is used appropriately, if you make it so difficult for anyone to obtain the correct version of your logo, you’re basically sending them back to their graphics design tools to try and recreate your logo themselves. This is possibly the worse thing you want to happen, especially if you’re big enough to have a brand management department!

As a developer, I want the websites I create to look good on as many devices as I can optimise them for, and for this I need to have good quality images. Vector images ensures that I don’t have to worry about either shape or color, since they are infinitely scalable. Raster images, on the other hand, degrade quite quickly when resizing them, and need to be quite large to render correctly on high density screens.

If I was an organisation really caring about my brand and its visual elements, I’d make every attempt to have web developers or any other user of my logo obtain the right files as easily as possible! And I believe distributing the vector graphics for those logos is the best way to go about it!

What’s your take on it?