Lesson 5 of 6
Logos and brand kits
6 min read
You generate a gorgeous logo. It looks perfect on screen. Then you print it on a banner and the edges come out a blurry, jagged mess. What went wrong — and how do designers avoid it?
Two ways to store a picture
Every image on a screen is stored one of two ways, and for logos the difference is everything. A raster image is a grid of coloured dots — fine at its own size, but blow it up and you just get bigger, blockier dots. A vector image is stored as instructions — "a circle here, this line to there" — so the computer can redraw it razor-sharp at any size, from a business card to a billboard. Zoom in below and watch the difference.
A vector image is stored as shapes and instructions, not dots, so it stays perfectly crisp at any size — while a raster (dot-based) image goes blocky when you enlarge it.
Why logos must be vector
A logo has to work everywhere — tiny on a phone icon, huge on a shop sign — and look flawless at every size. That's exactly what vector is built for. It's also easy to recolour and tweak, because it's made of editable shapes, not baked-in pixels. A raster logo, by contrast, is locked to one size and blurs the moment you scale it up. So a real, usable logo is almost always a vector.
Because a logo must stay crisp at every size and be easy to recolour, it needs to be vector — a raster logo blurs the moment it's enlarged.
AI that makes vectors
Most image generators produce raster pictures — great for art, wrong for logos. A few tools are built specifically to output clean, editable vector graphics and whole brand kits — matching colours, fonts, and logo variations. Recraft and Looka are two names to know. If you need a logo, reach for a vector-first tool, not a general art generator.
Ask for your logo as SVG — that's the common vector file format. If a tool can only give you a PNG or JPG, it handed you raster (dots), and it will blur when you scale it up. Vector-first tools like Recraft and Looka give you the real, scalable thing.
The gist
- —Raster images are grids of dots that go blocky when enlarged; vector images are instructions that stay crisp at any size
- —Logos must look flawless from tiny to huge and be easy to recolour — so they need to be vector
- —Use vector-first tools like Recraft or Looka for logos and brand kits, and ask for an SVG file
A café hires you to make a logo that must look crisp on everything from a phone app icon to a giant window sign. What should you make sure you get?
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