A brand cannot exist without a logo. Your brand’s visual identity is supposed to enable people to set you apart from your rivals. A logo communicates to your target audience and reflects your brand’s personality and values. Your logo design should be able to tell people what your business sells and what kind of people it targets.
While one logo design can represent your company across various platforms, it’s not the case with the size of a logo. It’s essential to have different variations of logo dimensions. Your logo should fit nicely whether you want to upload it to your website, print it on visiting cards, or post it on social media.
If you’re on a budget and cannot afford to hire a professional designer, you can use free or cost-effective graphic design tools like Canva. With most graphic design tools, you can easily resize your logo by selecting custom or pre-decided dimensions.
Let’s move on to learn about the best size for logos and some essential practices to make them look professional.
Best Logo Size Practices
We’re talking about the logo dimensions, shape, and orientation when referring to the size of a logo. Making changes to the contents of your logo (icon, color scheme, company name, and slogan) helps it fit in any setting.
Here are a few things to remember while designing a logo.
1. Avoid Excessive Details
Too many details can make your logo look cluttery. See how top brands like Nike, Apple, and Samsung have simple symbols that represent their brand with integrity. Moreover, excessive details can make changing logo sizes difficult. When scaling down a logo with intricate details, it can appear blurry.
2. Have Variations
When creating logo variations, ensure your design doesn’t lose its scalability, proportion, balance, and versatility. These principles confirm that your logo appears professional and consistent across all platforms. These are the essential logo variations you need to have.
- Horizontal and vertical designs. In horizontal design, contents are placed beside the icon. In vertical design, contents are stacked on top of each other, maintaining some space to keep a balanced proportion.
- Color variations. Aside from the original colors, design a logo with transparent background, in black, only one color, and white grayscale.
- Different shapes.
- Different types. For instance, your master logo can be a wordmark. And you can have its variations by combining an icon with the wordmark or keep the other design just an initial. Take Google’s wordmark logo and its variation (“G”) as an example.
3. Export in the Right Format
The most suitable formats for your logo are vector files such as SVG. You can modify the logo and file format size using vector files without losing quality. PNG is also a great option for digital spaces.
4. Start With a Larger Size
Going from a large logo size to a small one is more convenient than expanding a small size to a large one. Now that you’re clear on the best logo design practices, here are the appropriate logo sizes for various platforms.
Logo Dimensions for Websites, Social Media, and Print
There is no standard logo size that fits all because different platforms have different requirements.
Logo Size For Websites and Applications
Think back if you’ve ever had a website experience where the logo didn’t fit right with the design. Or it was pixelated. What impression did that create in your mind of that brand?
Small mistakes, such as placing the logo wrongly on the website or inconsistency in brand identity elements, become a hurdle in reaching the top for many brands. Therefore, you need to make sure you’re doing everything right, from creating an effective design to selecting the proper logo size according to your website’s layout.
Usually, logos appear in two places on your website. One is the Favicon (you can see them in your bookmarks list, next to the URL in the address bar, and next to the site’s title in the tab.), and the other is the navigation bar (top of the place where the company name and links to different sections or webpages are given).
Navigation Bar
In most websites, header logos are left-aligned. Some designers place it in the middle, depending on the site’s layout. Don’t forget to link your header logo to your site’s home page. It will let the users navigate to your home page quickly by clicking on the logo, creating a good user experience.
The logo size for the navigation bar depends on the website builder if you’re using one. If you’re yet to decide which website builder to use, try Strikingly. It’s a ridiculously easy-to-use website builder that lets you create responsive websites by customizing templates.
Strikingly’s preferred logo size for the header is at least 700 px. Here’s how you can add your logo to your Strikingly site.
1. Sign up and go to the dashboard.
2. Click the “Create new site” button.
Image taken from Strikingly
3. Explore more than 200 free template options and select the one you like.
4. In most templates, you will find a logo in the top-left corner. Hover your pointer on it and click the “Edit” button that just showed up.
Image taken from Strikingly
5. Tap “Replace,” then upload your logo file from your computer.
Image taken from Strikingly
You can link your logo to your Homepage by clicking “Add a link” and pasting the URL in the link box.
In many website builders, usually, these are the logo sizes for the navigation bar.
Vertical layout:
- 160 x 160 px
Horizontal layout
- 350 x 175 px
- 250 x 150 px
- 400 x 100 px
Favicon
The standard favicon sizes are:
- 16 x 16 px
- 32 x 32 px
- 48 x 48 px
Website Banner Image
Displaying your logo as the website banner image can be a great way to greet your audience. For a banner image—the bigger the logo size, the better. Ensure to keep the size at least 1400 px.
App Icon Sizes
Below are the standard logo sizes for app icons.
- Android: 192x 192 px
- iPad: 152 x 152 px
- iPhone 6s and up: 180 x 180 px, 120 x 120 px (Spotlight search), 87 x 87 px (Settings)
- Windows: 62 x 62 px
Logo Sizes for Social Media
Social media is one of the best places for marketing your brand. For many people, social media platforms could be where they get to know about you. Therefore, your logo needs to be optimized for social media cover pictures, profile pictures, and posts wherever it can appear.
When plastering logos in small spaces on social media, consider using the monogram only. If you have a wordmark logo, you can design the initials to make a monogram version. A quick tip, try adding a miniature version of your logo to your social media posts. It helps with marketing.
Here are standard logo sizes for social media platforms.
- Profile pictures: 110 x 110 px
- Story: 1080 x 1920 px
- Thumbnail: 161 x 161 px
- Post: 1080 px
- Small logo on the post: 30 x 30px
- Profile Picture: 180 x 180 px
- Cover photo: 820 x 312 px
- Logo on the post: 50 x 50 px
- Shared link image: 1200 x 628 px
YouTube
- Profile picture: 800 x 800 px
- Channel cover image: 2560 x 1440 px
- Thumbnail: 1280 x 720 px
- Tweeted image: 440 x 220 px (minimum), 1024 x 512 px (maximum)
- Logo on the post: 50 x 50 px
- Cover photo: 1500 x 500 px
- Profile picture: 400 x 400 px
- Background photo: 1584 x 396 px
- Profile picture: 400 x 400 px
- Profile picture: 800 x 450 px
Logo Size for Printing
Your logo will appear everywhere, from your brand’s merchandise and banners to visiting cards and flyers. And to present your company well, it should be consistent and maintain its quality.
It’s best to choose vector file formats such as SVG for logo designs meant to be printed because you can expand vector files as much as you want without disturbing your design’s quality. Mostly, professional printers might want to make minute changes or resize the design, which makes using vector files even more critical.
Logos in print use CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) mode and RGB (red, green, blue) mode in digital. You can start designing your logo in CMYK mode, which is easier to transform into RGB mode later.
Here are the best logo sizes for print:
- Mugs: 8.5 x 3 inches
- Billboards: 27 x 40 inches
- US business cards: 3.5 x 2 inches
- T-shirts: 14 x 15 inches
- Letterheads: 210 x 297 mm for A4 and 8.5 x 11 inches for US standard letter size.
How to Change the Size of Your Logo?
There are three ways you can change the size of your logo. The easiest option is to pay a freelance designer if you’re unfamiliar with designing and can spend money. Another option is to use an image resizer. The third option is Photoshop. If you’re familiar with it, then modifying your logo size shouldn’t be a problem.
While logo sizes can vary from business to business, discussed above are guidelines for when you have no size preferences. Whatever size and designs you choose, ensure they do the best job at presenting your brand to your target audience.
