PNG or PDF for a logo: the two questions that decide it

4 October 2026 · Pathside guides

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The two questions that decide it

Everything about this choice follows from two questions. Ask them about the specific slot the logo is going into, not about the logo in general: the same logo needs different files in different places, which is why a designer hands over a folder rather than a file.

• Will it be resized? A PNG is a fixed grid of pixels, decided the moment it was exported. Ask for it larger than that and the edges soften, because there is nothing there to draw with. A PDF written by drawing software stores the artwork as outlines and redraws them at whatever size it is asked for.
• Does it need a transparent background? PNG carries an alpha channel, so whatever sits behind the logo shows through. That is the single feature that makes it the default for logos on the web, and the web platform's own format guidance names transparency as the reason to choose PNG over JPEG.

Two noes and either file will do — send the one that was asked for. A yes to the first means PDF. A yes to the second, in anything that takes an image, means PNG.

When to send a PNG

Send a PNG to anything that expects an image: a web page, a social profile, a slide, a word processor document, an email signature.

There is a hard technical reason under that list. The formats a browser will draw inside a page are a short, fixed set — PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, AVIF and SVG among them — and PDF is not one of them. A PDF cannot be used as a page image at all. Send one to whoever is building the site and they will render it to a PNG the moment it arrives, at a size they guessed.

So do the guessing yourself, and do it properly: work out the pixels the slot needs before you export anything. What size to export a logo at has the two sums and the common slots worked out.

When to send a PDF

Send a PDF when the final size is not settled, or is settled at something large: print, signage, a banner, anything that will be scaled by someone you will never speak to. Guides to logo file formats are consistent about which side of that line each format sits on — PDF on the print side, PNG on the digital one — and print shops asking for “the vector” mean an .ai, an .eps, or a PDF that came straight out of drawing software. How to send a logo to a printer goes through what to attach and what to write.

PDF also wins when the point is approval rather than production. It opens on practically any device without an account or a plugin, at the size it was drawn at, so both of you can be reasonably sure you are looking at the same thing.

Is a PDF logo always vector?

No, and this is what catches people out. A PDF page is a container: it can hold vector outlines, live text and plain bitmaps at once, in any mix. A logo exported from drawing software is vector inside it. A scan, a screenshot or a photo saved as a PDF is a picture in a PDF wrapper, and forwarding it to a printer buys you nothing at all.

The test takes five seconds. Open the file and zoom hard into a curved edge or the corner of a letter. Outlines stay crisp however far you go; pixels break into squares. How to tell if a file is vector covers that check and the cases where the file extension lies about what is inside.

Why not a JPG?

JPG is the wrong answer for a logo twice over, and it is the format most likely to be sitting in your downloads folder.

First, transparency: the JPEG format has no alpha channel, so every JPG is fully opaque. A logo saved as one arrives with a white rectangle around it, which shows up the moment anybody puts it on a coloured background.

Second, edges. JPEG's compression was built for photographs. It works in small blocks and throws away the detail that matters least in a photograph — which is exactly the detail a logo is made of. Flat colour, straight lines and type come back with a faint halo that nobody asked for. PNG is lossless: the pixels you exported are the pixels that arrive.

JPG earns a place when the artwork is a photograph, and not really before. Convert AI to PNG on your phone works through the same comparison from the other end.

What if you only have one of them?

If all you have is a PNG and somebody wants print quality, nothing fixes that honestly. Enlarging it, sharpening it or running it through a tracing tool gives you a larger version of the same pixels, or a guess at the shapes that is close but not the logo. The only real answer is to go back to whoever drew it and ask for the original.

The other direction is easy. If what you have is a PDF and you need a PNG, the PDF is already a description of the artwork, and anything that can open it can render it at the pixel size you name. Decide that size first.

Getting either one out of a file your phone will not open

The awkward case is the one where the logo turns up as an .ai or an .eps, the phone has nothing that opens it, and you cannot even see what you are about to forward. Pathside is built for that moment. It opens .ai, .pdf, .svg and .svgz, and .eps when that file carries a PDF inside it, deciding what a file is by reading its first bytes rather than trusting its name. Opening, zooming and stepping through artboards are free, and nothing you open is sent anywhere — it behaves the same in aeroplane mode.

Exporting is a one-time unlock, and it is worth being exact about what that gives you: renderings, rather than the drawing itself. PNG or JPG at 1024, 2048 or 4096 pixels on the long edge, or a one-page PDF at the artwork's own size, one page at a time. That is precisely what a web slot or a preview attachment wants. The file a press works from should still be the one the designer made. Either way, check the logo before it leaves your phone.