Which Logo Files to Send a Client (and What Each One Is For)

Every designer has had this email. It arrives eight months after the invoice was paid, usually on a Friday afternoon, and it says: "Hi! Our printer needs the logo in vector, can you send?"

You sent vector. You sent it in the handover folder, in a subfolder, named correctly. But the folder went to the marketing manager who has since left, and nobody else ever opened it.

The handoff package is not a formality at the end of a project. It is the thing that determines whether your work survives contact with the client's organisation. Get it right and the logo stays correct for years. Get it wrong and someone eventually screenshots it off the website.

Start from who opens the file

Formats make no sense in the abstract. They make sense once you picture the four people who will actually double-click something.

The printer. Wants vector, wants it in CMYK or with Pantone references, and will ask for EPS even in 2026 because their workflow was built in 2009 and works fine.

The web developer. Wants SVG, ideally with the paths cleaned and the fills not hard-coded to a colour they need to change. Will accept PNG and quietly resent it.

The marketing person. Wants a PNG with a transparent background that they can drop into a deck, a social template, or an email signature. This is the file that gets used the most and specified the least.

The office manager making a PowerPoint at 4:50pm. Wants something that works when dragged. If they cannot find it, they will use whatever is on the website, at whatever size it happens to be.

Build the package for those four and you have covered roughly everything.

The formats, honestly

AI — your working file. It has your layers, your live type, your construction grid, your notes to yourself. Send a copy, clearly marked as the master, but never send it as the only vector file. It requires Illustrator to open, the type breaks if the client does not have your fonts, and it invites editing by people who should not be editing.

EPS — old, still requested. Printers and sign makers ask for it out of habit and it costs you nothing to include. Outline the type before you export.

PDF — the most useful vector format in the package and the most underrated. Anyone can open it, on any machine, without design software. It holds vector data, so a printer can use it directly. If you only include one vector file for a non-technical client, make it this one.

SVG — for the web, and only for the web. Open it in a text editor before you ship it and check that it is not 400KB of Illustrator metadata around 3KB of path. Strip the clipping paths, name the file sensibly, and if the developer will need to recolour it, tell them which fill to target.

PNG — raster with transparency. This is the workhorse. Export it larger than anyone thinks they need, because people scale down and never up. A 2000px wide primary lockup covers almost every screen use.

JPG — no transparency, so it arrives with a white box around it. Include one anyway. Some systems — old CRM tools, certain print portals, a surprising number of HR platforms — simply refuse PNG.

WebP, AVIF — leave them out. If the client's site needs them, their developer will generate them from the SVG. Adding them to a handoff folder just adds files nobody recognises.

ICO / favicon — worth including if you drew a dedicated small-size variant. If you did not, say so, because a scaled-down primary mark makes a poor favicon and someone will otherwise make one badly. This is connected to minimum size — below a certain point, a logo needs a redrawn version rather than a smaller one.

Colour versions, not just formats

Formats are one axis. The other is colour, and this is where packages usually fall short.

At minimum you need the primary full-colour version, a solid black version, and a solid white version for dark backgrounds. Those three cover the situations that actually arise: the brochure, the fax-quality photocopy, the photo overlay.

The white version causes a specific, recurring problem. It is invisible in a file browser, on a white background, in every preview thumbnail. People open the folder, see nothing, and assume the file is corrupt. Two fixes, both cheap: name it so the name does the work (gridme-logo-white-on-dark.png), and include one flattened preview image showing all the variants on a mid-grey so anyone can see what they have.

If the identity uses Pantone, remember that a HEX code cannot carry that information. The difference between HEX, RGB, CMYK and Pantone matters most at exactly this handoff moment, because after this, nobody is asking you.

A folder structure that survives

Deep nesting loses files. So do clever names. What works is flat, obvious, and boring:

BrandName-Logo-Package/
  01-READ-ME-FIRST.pdf
  02-Print/
     brandname-logo-primary-cmyk.pdf
     brandname-logo-primary-cmyk.eps
     brandname-logo-black.pdf
     brandname-logo-white.pdf
  03-Digital/
     brandname-logo-primary.svg
     brandname-logo-primary-2000px.png
     brandname-logo-black-2000px.png
     brandname-logo-white-2000px.png
     brandname-logo-primary.jpg
  04-Master-Files/
     brandname-logo-master.ai

Numbered folders because file browsers sort alphabetically and you want the order to mean something. Full brand name in every filename because these files will be detached from their folder within a week. No spaces, no ampersands, nothing that breaks a URL when someone inevitably uploads one to a CMS.

The one page that saves you the Friday email

Put a single PDF at the top of the package. One page, not ten. It needs:

• Each logo variant shown at a usable size, so someone can visually match what they need
• A plain sentence under each saying when to use it
• Colour values — HEX, RGB, CMYK, and Pantone if relevant
• Clearspace and minimum size, with a diagram rather than a paragraph
• One line telling them who to contact for anything not covered

This is not the brand guidelines document. It is the sheet that stops eighty percent of the questions a brand guidelines document would have answered if anyone read it. If the project includes full guidelines, this page is the excerpt that lives inside the logo folder where the files are.

If you find yourself rebuilding that page by hand for every project, that is exactly the layout a presentation sheet is meant to standardise.

Things that quietly go wrong

Live type in delivered vector. If the client opens an EPS without your font, the wordmark reflows into Myriad and they do not necessarily notice. Outline everything that leaves your machine. Keep live type only in the master file.

RGB colour in print files. Illustrator will happily export an RGB PDF that looks perfect on screen and prints muddy. Set the document colour mode deliberately for the print exports.

One giant ZIP with forty files. More files is not more thorough. It is more surface area for someone to pick wrongly. Every file in the package should have a reason to exist that you could state out loud.

Delivering only what was asked for. The client asked for "the logo". They do not know to ask for a reversed version. Six months later they need one, you are on another project, and they make it themselves by dropping a white box behind the mark.

Doing this with GridMe

Most of the above is file hygiene, and no panel does it for you. What GridMe's Present stage handles is the sheet at the front of the package — logo variants laid out with colour values labelled, plus clearspace and minimum size diagrams, on artboards you can export straight to that first PDF.

Download GridMe if building that page by hand for every handoff has started to feel like unpaid admin.