Brand & Design
What is a logo?
The primary visual mark a company uses to identify itself, typically a wordmark, symbol, or combination, optimized to be recognizable at any size.
A logo is the most concentrated piece of brand identity. Done well, it carries the company's name, tone, and visual world in a few hundred pixels. Done poorly, it makes everything downstream (the website, the deck, the dashboard avatar) feel off.
Logos come in several flavors: wordmarks (Google, Coca-Cola), letter-marks (HBO, IBM), symbol-only marks (Nike's swoosh, Apple's apple), and combination marks that pair a symbol with the wordmark (Slack, Mailchimp). Most brands ship multiple variants (full lockup, symbol-only, monochrome) and use them in different contexts.
Brand.dev's logo API returns the right variant for the right context: full SVG vector when available, transparent PNG fallbacks at multiple sizes, and a backdrop image for cases where you need the logo on its in-brand background. We were built specifically to fix the post-Clearbit gap in this market.
How Brand.dev uses logo
Endpoints in the Brand.dev API where this concept comes up directly.
FAQ
What's the best file format for a logo?
SVG for the web and any context that supports vector. High-res PNG with transparency for the cases where SVG isn't accepted (some email clients, some social platforms).
How do I get a company's logo programmatically?
Pass the domain to Brand.dev's logo API, GET /v1/brand?domain=stripe.com, and you get the SVG, PNG fallbacks, and dominant color back in a single call.
Logo vs wordmark vs symbol?
Wordmark is text-only (Google). Symbol is icon-only (Apple's apple). Logo is the umbrella term, most brands' logo is actually a combination of wordmark + symbol.