The bakery that needed its logo in five file formats

A bakery came to us with a logo she had already paid for, and a problem she could not name. She kept saying it "did not work anywhere."

The problem

She had one file. A JPEG, about 800 pixels wide, with a white background.

Everything she needed to do with her own logo, she could not do:

• The sign company asked for a vector file. She did not have one, so they offered to redraw it — for a fee, and slightly wrong.
• Her website header had a white rectangle around the logo, because the file had a white background rather than a transparent one.
• The paper bags were a single ink colour. Her logo was a gradient, so the printer flattened it into a grey smudge and sent a proof she declined.
• Her social avatar was a wide logo squashed into a circle, which cropped the word "Bakery" off both ends.

Nobody had stolen anything from her. The designer drew a good mark. The job simply stopped one step before it was usable, and she had no way to know that at the time — you cannot tell a finished file pack from an unfinished one until you try to print something.

That is what makes this failure so common. It is invisible at handover. The JPEG opens, it looks like the logo, and the relationship ends on a good note. The bill arrives at the sign shop four months later.

I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.

— William Morris (1834–1896)The Beauty of Life (1880) · lecture to the Birmingham Society of Arts, February 1880

Morris was arguing about who art is for. The same sentence works, unexpectedly, as a rule about file formats: a logo only one specialist can open is a logo for a few. Hers needed to be openable by a sign maker, a bag printer, a web developer and herself, on a Tuesday, without asking anyone.

What we did

We did not redesign her logo. She liked it, her customers recognised it, and redrawing a mark somebody is already fond of is a way to charge for a problem that does not exist.

We rebuilt it as a vector, then produced the pack it should have come with:

1. A vector master. Scalable to the side of a van or down to a favicon. Everything else is generated from this one file.
2. Transparent PNGs, large and small. So the logo sits on a photo or a coloured panel without a white box behind it.
3. A one-colour version, solid black and solid white. This is the one that goes on the bags, the stamp, the invoice and the apron.
4. Two lockups — wide for the website header, stacked for the avatar — so nobody has to improvise a layout at three in the afternoon.
5. A one-page usage note: the colour values, the font name, the minimum size. One page. It is the document that means the next person who touches her brand does not guess.

What changed

The sign went up without a redraw fee. The bags printed in one colour and looked deliberate rather than degraded. Her avatar stopped cropping her own name.

None of that is a growth story, and we are not going to pretend it is one. It is an afternoon of unblocking, after eight months of a business owner assuming she was bad at explaining what she wanted.

That is the part worth saying out loud: she was not. She had been handed an incomplete deliverable and no vocabulary for what was missing.

The second-order effect was the one she mentioned later. Having the one-colour version meant she started using the mark in places she had previously avoided — the stamp on the bag, the header of an invoice, a chalkboard stencil. A logo she could not deploy had been, functionally, a logo she did not have.

If you are commissioning one

You do not need to understand file formats to avoid this. You need one sentence in the email before you agree a price:

"Can you confirm the deliverables include a vector master, transparent PNGs, a one-colour version, a stacked and a wide lockup, and a one-page usage note?"

A good designer will say yes, and probably say it was included anyway. Anyone who answers "what do you need all that for" has told you something useful for the price of asking.

It is also worth asking who owns the files at the end. The answer should be you, in writing, and it costs nothing to establish at the start and a great deal to establish later.

What it cost

Rebuilding the mark as a vector and producing the pack was a fixed-price piece of work, quoted before we started, with the price on the service page rather than in an email. No discovery phase, no retainer, no proposal deck.

We mention the shape rather than the number because the number is published and will change; the shape is the part that matters. A job like this one is small, bounded, and knowable in advance — and a studio that cannot tell you which of those three it is before starting is telling you something.

One thing we would do differently: we should have asked for the original designer's files before rebuilding. She had them, in an email from eight months earlier, and nobody thought to look. It would have saved about two hours. The rest of the job would have been identical, but two hours is two hours, and it was our question to ask.