If there is one thing when running a business, you know how important your logo is. It's not just a pretty picture. It's your brand, it's worth value and for many of us in business it takes on a life of its own.
This is why it's so important to know the difference between a pixel logo and a vector logo.
When creating your logo, your designer will most likely have created the file as .ai or .eps. If not, ask them for the vector logo. These files are based on linear mathematics, vectors. This means that the program they are created in uses mathematics to build up the file to any size, length or height. As we know, this could go to infinity. This is important for wide format printing.
On the other hand, we have pixel based logos, that come in the form of .jpeg or .png etc... These start to pixelate the bigger you stretch the image. There's no mathematics involved and the pixels are fixed at a certain resolution.
TIP 1:
So, the take away here is that you always need to have a vector logo handy when you want to print anything bigger than the size of a photograph, otherwise your logo will look pixelated.
The other thing is that in the file is information about the CMYK colours. When your designer made your logo, you chose colours that represent your business. Vector files will have this information contained in the file, so when printers print your logo, the printer uses the ink colours, cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). In pixel based files, the colour is produced using RGB. Currently, screen technology has moved faster than printer technology. There are no printers in the world that uses red, green and blue inks (RGB) to reproduce your logo colours. As such, when using a pixel logo file, the colour that gets printed will be different to your chosen colour when printed.
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The takeaway here is that you use CMYK colours in your printing files otherwise the colour reproduction will be inaccurate.
Hope that clarifies matters. Speak to us if you ever need help with a pixel based logo. We can help redraw the logo so that it is vector based and we can even replicate the RGB colour, to a certain degree, to a CMYK colour.