If it does not work in black at 16 pixels, it is not a logo

The two sizes that decide everything

A logo will be seen at 16 pixels — a browser tab, an app icon in a crowded folder, a WhatsApp profile picture on a 5-inch screen at arm's length. And it will be seen at 40 feet on the side of a building. Almost every design decision that goes wrong goes wrong at the small end.

So test there first. Before you show anyone anything:

1. 1Export at 16, 32 and 64 pixels.
2. 2Put them on your phone and hold it at arm's length.
3. 3If you cannot tell what it is, the mark is too complicated, no matter how good it looks at 800 pixels.

Then do the second test, which is harder to argue with.

The black-and-white test

Set the whole mark to 100% black on white. Then invert it: white on black.

If it still reads in both, you have a logo. If it collapses, you have an illustration that happens to have a company name near it.

This is not an aesthetic preference. It is a list of the places your mark actually has to go:

• Embroidered on a shirt pocket in one thread colour
• A rubber stamp on a delivery challan
• Engraved on a pen given away at a trade fair
• A single-colour screen print on a jute bag
• A newspaper classified advert
• A thermal-printed invoice
• Etched on glass, cast in a mould, cut in vinyl

None of these can render a gradient, a shadow or a transparency. All of them are ordinary requests from ordinary clients.

The inversion matters separately because ink spreads. A light mark on a dark ground closes up: thin counters fill in, hairline gaps disappear, and the mark that looked crisp goes muddy. If your counters vanish when inverted, open them up now.

Why a gradient mesh is a liability

Gradient meshes, transparency, blend modes and drop shadows are lovely on a screen and are the four things that cause the most trouble downstream.

• They cannot be embroidered, cut, stamped or one-colour printed at all.
• They force transparency flattening on export to older formats. Flattening slices the artwork into regions and rasterises the ones containing transparency at a fixed resolution. The result is the classic complaint: a logo comes back from the printer with a faintly visible grey or white box behind it, or a hairline seam across the middle of a soft shadow. The box is the boundary of the flattened region.
• They are heavy to process, and small shops' RIPs are old.

None of this means never use colour or depth. It means: build the mark as flat black first. Get it working with nothing but silhouette. Then add colour, and keep the flat version as a deliverable in its own right. If the black version is boring, colour will not rescue it — it will just be a boring logo in nice colours.

A useful crude limit: if your mark needs more than about 150 nodes, it is an illustration. Real marks are usually under 50.

Optical corrections, which nobody measures and everybody sees

Geometry and perception disagree, and perception wins.

• A circle set beside a square of the same height looks smaller. Overshoot the circle by 1–2%. Every typeface does this — the "O" is taller than the "H" and you have never noticed.
• A horizontal bar placed at the exact vertical centre of a letterform looks too low. Raise it slightly.
• A triangle pointing right, centred in a circle by its bounding box, looks off to the left, because its visual mass sits left of its geometric centre. Nudge it right. This is why the play button on every media player is not mathematically centred.

You do this by eye, at 100%, then again at 16 pixels.

Grids are the reverse of this: the golden-ratio circle diagrams people post over famous logos are decoration applied afterwards. No one has ever chosen a mark because a set of circles fitted it.

What you actually hand over

The deliverable is not one file. It is a small set, and delivering it properly is a large part of what separates a paid job from a favour:

• Master vector working file (.cdr, .ai, .svg, .afdesign)
• Vector PDF with fonts outlined, for print and for anyone who has nothing
• SVG for the web
• PNGs with transparency at 1024, 512, 256, 64, 32 and 16 px
• Single-colour black version and white knockout version, separately
• A one-page usage sheet: minimum size, clear space around the mark expressed in units of the mark itself, the colour values in CMYK, RGB and hex, and two or three things not to do

All of it exports from Inkscape. There is no part of this list you need a subscription for.

The AI question, briefly

Logo generators produce either a raster image or an auto-traced vector with hundreds of untidy nodes, which fails everything in this lesson at the small end. There is also a real duplication risk: a generator trained to produce logos will produce marks close to ones it has seen, and a mark that resembles an existing registered trademark is a legal problem, not a style problem.

If you use generated output at all, treat it as a sketch and redraw the final mark yourself with primitives and booleans. Ownership of generated output is genuinely unsettled and differs by country — Making Things With AI sets out the actual state of the disagreement. For a mark, route around it: trademark protects a logo through use and registration regardless of how it was drawn, and that is the protection a client is really buying.

Today

Take your current logo. Set it to 100% black. Export at 16 px. Look at it on your phone. Most people find something to fix in the first thirty seconds.