As part of the business community your organization is often asked to sponsor events, make donations, and participate in other organizations in exchange for visibility. Of course exposure is not the only reason that you make these contributions, but it definitely is part of the return. As a designer who builds websites for many of the organizations that you may contribute to, I am often hunting down company logos to put up on these websites. It’s often a difficult task because many business owners don’t know how to get their logo in the format that I need, or it takes a really long time to track down.
Many times as designers we must resort to hunting down logos on Google Image Search, and often it may not be the most recent iteration of that logo. Companies change their logos all the time, and they don’t think to send the new logo to their affiliates. This results in a very hazy brand over time because there are several different versions of your logo spread all over web.
Defining a New Standard
Enter Relogo. Relogo is working on defining a new standard that would work similar to the favicon. Basically you will save a .svg (scalable vector graphic) file out of your favorite vector design program (Illustrator, Inkscape, etc.), and put it at the root level of your website. In our case the file is called “logo.svg”.
Next, all you have to do is include a link relation to that logo in the head tag of your home page. It will look something like this:
<link rel="logo" type="image/svg" href="http://www.alligatortek.com/logo.svg" />
That’s it! You now have a logo ready for any of your affiliates to use. Because this is a vector graphic, they can use any size they wish, and don’t have to use a photo editing program to save different sizes.
Accessing the New Logo Format
Relogo is also working on an open API that will allow direct access to your logo based on our domain name. This means that your affiliates can simply use an image tag like this:
<img src="http://relogo.org/api/www.alligatortek.com" alt="alligatortek" width="150px" />
This will display your logo at a width of 150px on their website. You can also scale it up without loss of quality.
<img src="http://relogo.org/api/www.alligatortek.com" alt="alligatortek" width="400px" />
It’s a very simple step that you can take now that will help to increase your brand’s consistency. For questions, please leave a comment below.