Logo

A logo is a graphic sign created to identify a brand, an organization or a product. The word is short for logotype, formed from the Greek logos, word, and typos, imprint. A logo can be a symbol, a name drawn in a particular lettering or both together, and it has to stay recognizable at every size, from a tiny icon on a screen to a large printed surface. That requirement is the reason logos are drawn as vectors.

Design.1 uses the logo as the hook of the whole lesson. The introduction asks why a brand logo is usually made in Adobe Illustrator rather than Photoshop. The article then explains raster images, made of pixels, whose quality always pertains to the screen on which they are viewed, and vector graphics, made of mathematical formulas.

The answer comes in the last section: because vector graphics can be infinitely scaled, a brand logo is always made as a vector graphic. The article observes that logos come in many different shapes and colors but are never really composed of pixels. Along the way, the logo of Mastercard is recalled as a familiar image of two overlapping circles, the shape of the Vesica Piscis.