Most images you see on the web are called raster images and they are based on pixels. A pixel is a little dot of color. Most printers also use dots to create images, however for the image to look clear a printer needs a lot more dots in every inch than a website does.
The number of dots or pixels in the image is called the resolution.
When a website is designed, web resolution images are created. If no logo is available, I will put the company’s name at the top of your website, there may even be a graphic with it, but that graphic can’t be used for other projects because blowing it up or reducing it’s size will greatly reduce the quality of the image.
To illustrate this, let me demonstrate with the below image.
Here is a web image, it looks perfectly fine for a web project.
Now let’s say this was created only as a web image, and a business card is now needed. For that the image would need to be blown up quite a bit since a printer needs more pixels per inch. This is how it would look blown up only about 2x as big. To be honest, the size below isn’t even big enough for a business card. So you can see what kind of trouble this would cause if you used a web graphic for your logo.
This is why a professionally designed and created logo is always recommended if you don’t have one. Other images you find are not appropriate for logo usage. Additionally, some “designers” don’t understand this importance, so you should ask anybody you consider working with what kind of files they will deliver to you at the end of the project, and if the answer isn’t .eps or .ai, keep looking.
A vector image is different from other images you see on websites or use day to day because the shape of your logo is not stored in pixels, it is stored as a mathematical equation. So if there are curves or corners, the program knows the degree of the angle, so no matter how big or small the size of the image is changed it will always look the same. This is important because it allows your logo to be used for any project large or small.
If you don’t have a logo for your business yet, getting one done before your new website or business card is a great thing to do. Another part of the process is a lot of careful thought and conversation about your brand identity. Generally, your website should fit with your logo, and not the other way around.
