You've been working hard gathering inspiration and other materials for your adjacent design projection, and so don't let a blunder like choosing the wrong file format or tool end you in your tracks before you've even started. When it comes to design, file types matter, and the right one can hateful the difference between a logo that looks neat with no artifacts at any size — perfect for today's various digital devices and print needs — versus one that's a minor, pixelated mess when viewed at anything other than its native dimensions.

Vector files, dissimilar rasters, are made up of lines and shapes, non individual pixels, so you can stretch and resize them to your middle'south content without reducing quality or fidelity in the source file. Rasters, on the other paw, look best at a specific size or smaller, as they're made upwardly of hundreds or thousands of tiny dots that correspond to specific colors and their placement within. Because rasters are typically compressed from a raw source file into a lossy format, they'll likely have artifacts and other visual issues even at their native resolution — and it'll just go worse every bit y'all resize, ingather and shift colors for different uses over fourth dimension.

Before you kickoff thinking virtually how to make a vector image, it's of import to know the basics of when and where to use vectors versus raster images.

Why Vector Images?

If y'all've e'er tried to increase the size of a typical epitome y'all find online, y'all've likely encountered the number one use instance for vectors. Vectors are perfect representations of the original format — no matter the size — and they scale up or down without issue. This is in stark dissimilarity to rasterized or pixelated images that are best seen at i native resolution or smaller and cannot be manipulated without losing quality and fidelity in the process.

The cloak-and-dagger is that vectors are made up of scalable lines and shapes embedded with truthful colors, not the fuzzy, color-per-pixel matrix you lot'll find with raster images. Funny enough, though, most images you encounter online are intended to be unfaithful representations of their sources, mainly for bandwidth reasons — and for specific applications such as on a specific webpage at a specific size. Indeed, a rasterized epitome's file size tin can be a fraction of its uncompressed, total size. Multiply that by dozens or hundreds of images institute on a typical webpage and it can mean the difference between a page that loads in a second or two and something that crawls along for 10 or 20 seconds before a visitor hightails it and leaves.

Unfortunately, notwithstanding, vectors are a bit more complicated to create than your average raster epitome, which typically limits their use to logos and designs that are oft resized — fifty-fifty though raster images are pop formats for exported versions of vector images. Simply regardless of your bandwidth needs or the file type of your paradigm'south final consign, working with a vector gives you lot the near flexibility and maneuverability when it comes time to create that webpage, newsletter or app since you tin can easily manipulate and stretch a vector prior to a rasterized export — only brand sure to go along the original source vector handy.

And so, without further ado, hither's how to make a vector logo.

Stride ane: Choose Your Tool

Because there are so many epitome creation tools out at that place — from quick online tools to full-featured desktop apps that take years or decades to master — information technology can be hard to know where to starting time with vectors.

One of the virtually pop tools is Adobe Illustrator, which is an industry-standard graphics software for Mac, PC and other platforms.

Other solutions, such as our free online logo maker tool, take a lot of the guesswork out of creating a vector logo by providing you with templatized designs and pace-by-step guidance that can assist novices create vector-based logos with minimal fuss and time.

In general, if you're new to vectors, you're probably amend off with an online tool that will walk you through the process of creating a vectorized logo rapidly and easily. Illustrator and other full-featured desktop tools are better for seasoned designers with their steep learning curves and expensive pricing structures.

Step 2: Option Your Colors and Decide on a Concept

Whether you're designing a corporate logo or a little bit of flourish for a social media profile or just something simple for your portfolio, you'll accept to make some decisions before you become to the pattern $.25. For vectors and logos, less is more than, so pick two or three colors that work well together and think almost the overall management you want to go with your vector logo. Once you have your colors and concept fix, you're ready to start designing.

Footstep 3: Sketch It Out

Before you start clicking away, take hold of a pad of paper, crayons, colored pencils, markers, pens — whatever you have bachelor — and sketch out a handful of ideas. Try different colors, shading and accents; the more ideas you attempt here the ameliorate equipped you lot'll exist when yous bound on the estimator. Especially if you're non well versed in computer blueprint, you'll salvage a ton of time and headache with reliable tools earlier you kickoff fumbling around through menus, keystrokes and clicks. Even a pen and a slice of lined paper is great for jotting downwards quick ideas that would accept yous much longer to realize on the figurer — and they may not work anyway.

Pace 4: Starting time Designing Your Logo

In Illustrator, create a new blank document (File > New) and start with the shape tool. Selection one of your colors and begin drawing and manipulating shapes while making use of your reference sketches, layering where necessary and arranging everything into the concept and colors yous chose in the previous stride. Realistically, you'll need to be familiar with diverse design concepts and principles (and have a lot of time) to turn your blank canvas into something resembling a completed logo.

Here'south a bones primer that may assist you create a basic analogy.

How to Vectorize a Logo

If y'all already have a rasterized logo or a design that you'd like to turn into a vector to be resized for a specific application, the skilful news is that you tin use Illustrator or other vector-based design tools to trace your existing image and then tweak it from there.

Here'southward a corking article that goes through just that from our friends over at MakeUseOf, but note that it could take hours or days to properly vectorize an image, especially if yous're new to Illustrator or yous take a limited design background. And, unless y'all're looking to become a designer by trade, your time may exist better spent taking advantage of tools that make the process easier and allow yous to kickoff past browsing designs, not staring at a blank screen.

Creating a Logo from Templates

Our online logo making services (and other online tools like ours) accept a lot of the guesswork out of creating logos by providing you with various, professional templates and already completed logos for you to alter, tweak and save for your own use.

Offset by loading up our free logo creator and choose from a few standard logo styles.

Examples of initial, icon, badge, and text logo styles.

Next upward, pick a font that captures the design aesthetic y'all're shooting for. In full general, serif fonts — which have decorative lines and tapers — look and feel more traditional than sans serif fonts that capture a more than modern look. Only these aren't absolutes; at that place are enough of ways to make a serif font look more modern or to make a sans serif expect more traditional. Fifty-fifty if yous're not sure, or you'll know when you lot come across information technology, yous tin can pick multiple fonts and see how text treatment tin can lend a different graphic symbol to your design.

Examples of sans serif, serif, script, and display fonts.

After that, merely choose a layout that best represents your intended use, whether it's a design-y scrap at the top with text underneath, text in the middle, text off to the side — or whatsoever information technology is that catches your eye.

Examples of four different logo placements.

With all your options selected, we'll show you various logo concepts that fit your parameters and preferences. If you change your mind, y'all can hands customize the results from the left-hand bar, or you can search for specific logos equally a starting signal using our custom logo search.

Once you lot've chosen a design, customize it by clicking the edit push. Hither, you can revisit the layout, colors, and text in an easy to use editor that does much of the heavy lifting for you.

Step 5: Save Your Logo

When you're done editing and tweaking your pattern, it's fourth dimension to relieve. Typically, this is done in your programme's File > Save or Export menu. Just be conscientious. Yous'll want to relieve your logo in the right format to ensure compatibility and the power to resize down the line. If yous relieve it as a png, tiff, gif, jpeg or other raster exports (tip: make certain you're enlightened of proper file types for image transparency), all your piece of work will be for aught unless you also relieve a vectorized version.

The expert matter is that there are plenty of vectorized file formats, and any one of them are fine to ensure the futureproofing of your design. AI (Adobe Illustrator Artwork) is the native file format of Illustrator. When y'all become to save your file, it'll typically default to this file type, and if you only want to piece of work in Illustrator and other systems that open and work with AI files, in that location's not much more you need to do.

Even so, if you want to collaborate with others or pass off the file to the customer for additional uses, it may be best to go with a standard vector file blazon that doesn't limit your options. EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic) are ii universal file types that work in various programs — SVG also has the stardom of being supported by almost spider web browsers — and it'southward not a bad idea to save multiple copies of your logo in AI, EPS and SVG format to cover all your bases.

Our free logo designer does this, and it's a crucial aspect of vector-based designs — after all, if you don't take your logo'southward source file in multiple, compatible formats, you may be express in the changes you lot can practise in the hereafter. Once you have your vector saved in the appropriate vector-based formats, you may as well desire to save out rasterized versions for electronic mail or other uses, though you could always go back and create an export whenever needed. Note that many social media platforms still rely on rasterized images of specific sizes, so yous'll need exports for these anyway.

Vector-Based Design for the Win!

With these elementary tips, we hope we've helped yous empathize the benefits of using vectors in your of import design projects. While in that location are still many uses for raster images in digital design, vectors are best for logos and images that must work beyond multiple devices, screens, print applications, etcetera.

Seriously, in one case you go vector, you won't want to deal with blurry, pixelated raster images ever over again. We don't blame yous, and we welcome you lot over to the vector side. Better yet, cut some time out of your next vector-based logo project and give our free tool a try. Information technology's easy for novices, those new to design, and even experts tin cut downward on blueprint time by loading ane of our beautiful designs into their favorite editing tool.