Tag: logos

Don’t use JPEG for logos… and don’t think you can solve the problem by re-saving the JPEG as a PNG

Once you go JPEG, you can’t go back.

You may recall having seen this previously on my blog:

I’ve been singing the “Don’t use JPEG for logos!” refrain for so long that most of my clients (and whoever they’re dealing with to deliver logo image files to them) know logos on the web should be in PNG format (or even better, SVG), not JPEG.

But a lot of people don’t seem to understand that you can’t turn a JPEG into a PNG.

Oh, sure, you can technically do that. By which I mean, you can open a JPEG in Photoshop or a similar image editing program, and save it as a PNG. But doing that won’t fix anything.

JPEG is a “lossy” format. That means that its compression algorithm permanently loses data about the image for the sake of a smaller file size. There’s no way to get that data back. PNG is not a lossy format, which means that it compresses the image data in a way that it can faithfully recreate the original input image.

So, what do you think happens when you open a JPEG and re-save it as a PNG? That’s right… it looks exactly like the JPEG did.

Like I said at the beginning, once you go JPEG, you can’t go back. The only option is to track down the original source image in a lossless format, or to manually clean up the results as best as you can.

I wish I could say I’ve never done this, but I’m a pragmatic individual, and I also like to try to solve problems myself… it’s often faster and easier than tracking down the original source. More times than I can remember, I have used the flood tool to turn splotchy logos back into blocks of solid color — doing my best to clean up the anti-aliased edges. And when the characteristics of the logo are right, I’ll often re-set the text in the original fonts (recognizing fonts by sight is a valuable skill), tweaking Bezier curves if the logo has any customizations, and then try my best to faithfully recreate object shapes by tracing them with the pen tool.

It’s perversely kind of fun, and I especially like when I can do it without even bothering to tell the client. They usually just care about the results, not about how the sausage gets made. Except when the client is an Italian restaurant. Then I let them worry about the sausage.

OK, fine, DO use JPEG for your logo… here’s why

I have complained many times (OK, only those two times here on the blog, but countless other times to anyone within earshot) about people using JPEG for logos. It is bad, bad, bad.

But it just keeps happening.

Finally, I have stopped caring. Yes, go ahead and use JPEG for your logo. Send me the gnarliest, artifactiest, lowest-quality JPEG of your logo that you can find. And make sure it’s tiny. Like, 200 pixels wide or less.

Why?

Because I bill by the hour. I’m happy to fix your logo for you, and I will do it, whether you ask me to or not, whether you notice the difference or not, if this is what you send me as part of your project. (I can neither confirm nor deny that I might also write a blog post ranting about JPEG logos while I’m on the clock.)

Egads, I’ve never looked at that emoji closely. Are those dollar sign eyes with raised eyebrows, or closed eyes with dollar sign nostrils??? (Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.)

Don’t use JPEG for logos, example #24,315

A client just sent me a logo to add to their website. I let out a little whimper when I looked at the file and noticed that, as is so often the case when someone sends me a logo, it’s a JPEG.

Don’t use JPEG for logos!

Without naming names (or, hopefully, showing enough of the logo to give away the identity), here’s a close-up detail of the actual JPEG I was sent, which does a really good job of illustrating the issues. I zoomed way in on the file in Affinity Photo (my preferred alternative to the 800-pound gorilla of design software), and captured a screenshot which I am sharing here as a PNG — the correct format for logos, because it doesn’t introduce these “compression artifacts“:

Just in case the problems are not readily apparent to your eye, here’s a version where I’ve cranked up the contrast to accentuate the inconsistency of the colors in the image:

And for comparison, here’s what the same level of detail would look like if the image were delivered in PNG format instead of JPEG:

Of course, these days we can do even better than PNG. If a logo is a vector-based design (which it really should be), we can use SVG to get a perfectly sharp rendering of the logo at any size. Here’s what that would look like, zoomed in the same amount:

To be clear: the logo is not for my client’s organization itself. If that were the case I would have pushed back. It’s the logo of a partner organization that was provided to my client to add to the site, so there’s probably little that could be done. (OK, that’s not true; I could — and did — do what I often do in this situation. I went out and found a PNG version of the logo myself.)