Your company logo is one of the most important aspects of your marketing collateral. It’s your identity; it helps people “put a name with a face”. A lot of small businesses take the subject of logos very lightly-they might even use a generic piece of clipart to get by. But this is not going to cut it if you want to be successful in marketing your business. In this article, we’re going to quickly go over the importance of digitizing your logo and what that means.

Let’s start off by talking about the FedEx logo because this is a great example. You’ve all seen the FedEx truck drive by a time or two and you can recognize the logo anywhere, but have you really ever looked at it closely? If you look at the white space between the “E” and the “x”, it creates a perfect arrow. This arrow is obviously a symbol of their rapid and prompt delivery. At first glance, the logo seems very simple, but it has great impact and subtle, yet effective messaging. I could go into a whole series of blog postings about the elements of good logo design (maybe I’ll get to that sometime down the road) but today we’ll focus on the visual quality of your logo.

Back to the FedEx logo – FedEx uses their logo on a wide variety of materials, from their corporate branding materials such as their website, business cards and letterhead, to their delivery supplies and equipment such as boxes, trucks and even airplanes. On each of these materials, regardless of the size, the FedEx logo is crisp and clear. This is because they have a “vector” file of their logo. What does that mean? Well, when artwork is created in vector format, the computer is using mathematical equations to generate the graphic you see on the screen, therefore, it can be scaled as big or as small as you want it without losing its crisp quality. Take a look at the images below.

Image a. is a close-up of the FedEx logo in a raster format (this means that the image is made up of pixels instead of with mathematical calculations, therefore, scaling it will greatly reduce its quality). Image b. is a close-up of the same section of the FedEx logo, but this time it was created in vector format. See the difference?

Now, I know what you’re thinking; “Well, I don’t need to digitize my logo because I won’t be putting it on delivery trucks and I most certainly will not be putting it on an airplane.” However, will you be printing brochures? Business Cards? Signage? Then you need to digitize your logo! In order for your logo to have the best quality possible on your printed materials you need to have it in vector form. So if your only form of your logo is anything but an .eps or .ai file, call up a graphic designer and ask for them to digitize your company logo for you. (Note: depending on the complexity of your logo, this could take a good number of hours). Once you have your logo in vector format, the sky’s the limit! You could create a banner of your logo to cover the entire side of your building and it would still be crystal clear! (Please note: that is not a suggestion).