Guide · Logos
The five minutes that
make your logo look sharp.
The video is only half of it. The other half is the file you drop on top — and the difference between a good one and a bad one is visible from across the room.
The short version
If you only read one thing
Tick these five and you will never think about it again. Your logo is stored on your account, so this is a one-time job.
- A PNG with a transparent background
- At least 800 pixels wide — 1500 or more is better
- No white or colored box behind the mark
- Strokes thick enough to survive being shrunk
- A single-color or white version, if one exists
In detail
What each of those actually means
Transparent PNG, every time
A transparent PNG is a logo with nothing behind it — the letters and the mark, and empty space everywhere else. Dropped onto a video it looks like it was always part of the shot.
A JPG can never be transparent. It always carries a background, usually white, and on a dark video that shows up as a bright rectangle floating in the corner. We can cut a plain background out for you, but the edges are never quite as clean as a proper file, and gold foil or a soft drop shadow rarely survives the process.
Big enough to shrink
Eight hundred pixels wide is the minimum we accept. Fifteen hundred to two thousand is where it starts to look genuinely crisp on a 1080-wide reel.
Making a large logo smaller is free and lossless. Making a small logo bigger is not — the software has to invent detail that was never there, and it always looks like it. A 240-pixel logo pulled off your own website will be soft and slightly furry no matter what we do with it.
Strokes that survive the shrink
Your logo will sit at roughly a fifth of the width of a phone screen. Hairline strokes, fine serifs and thin script tails that look elegant on a business card can disappear entirely at that size, or flicker as the video compresses.
If your mark has a delicate version and a bolder version, send the bolder one. If the tagline underneath is set in tiny type, send the mark without it — an unreadable line of text under a logo reads as a smudge, and a smudge makes a video look cheap.
One color, or white
Jewelry footage is mostly dark, warm and moving. A full-color logo with a navy wordmark can vanish into a shadow halfway through the clip, and a logo that changes legibility mid-video is worse than no logo at all.
A plain white version, or a single-color version in your brand color, holds up over almost any footage. Most stores already have one — whoever built your signage or your business cards will have made it. If you only have the full-color version, send it anyway and we will work with it.
Send us
- Send the PNG with transparency — the file that looks like it has a checkerboard behind it in Photoshop.
- Send the largest version you can find, even if it seems absurdly big. We shrink it; we cannot grow it.
- Send a white or single-color version alongside your full-color one if you have both.
- Trim the empty space around the edges so the mark fills the file.
- Look at it at thumbnail size on your phone before you upload it. If you cannot read it there, nobody will read it on a reel.
Please not
- A JPG with a solid white background. It becomes a white rectangle sitting on your video.
- A screenshot taken from your own website. Almost always under 400 pixels wide, and usually already compressed twice.
- A photograph of your shop sign or a business card. The lighting, the angle and the paper texture all come along with it.
- A logo with a drop shadow or a glow already baked in. Over video it reads as a grubby halo.
- A version with the tagline set in 8pt type. Send the mark on its own and put the tagline in the text line instead.
- A file from a Word document or a PowerPoint slide. Those are compressed copies of a copy.
Practical
Where the good file usually is
Nearly every store has a proper logo file somewhere. It is rarely on the computer at the counter.
Ask whoever printed your business cards
Printers and sign makers keep the original artwork on file, usually for years. Email them and ask for the vector logo files — .ai, .eps, .svg or .pdf — plus a transparent PNG at around 2000 pixels wide. It is a normal request and it takes them two minutes.
Check the folder from your website build
Whoever built your site was sent the good version. Search your email for the month the site went live and look for an attachment or a shared drive link. The word to search for is usually just your store name.
Look for a file ending in .svg
An SVG has no resolution at all — it is drawn fresh at whatever size it is used, so it is always perfectly sharp. If you find one of these, it is the best possible thing you can send us.
If none of that turns anything up
Send the best file you have and say so. We can clean up a reasonable image by hand — straighten it, cut the background away, rebuild a clean edge. It is not magic, and a genuinely bad source will still look like a bad source, but it is usually better than nothing while you chase the original.
On the video
How it ends up looking
You place it yourself in the customizer and see the result before you pay. These are the defaults and the reasoning behind them.
It lives in a corner, small
The default is bottom-right at about eighteen percent of the video width, which is where a viewer's eye goes last and lingers longest. You can drag it anywhere you like in the customizer and watch it move in real time.
It stays out of the interface
Instagram and Facebook lay their own buttons, captions and profile name over the bottom and right edges of a reel. We keep the placement inside the safe area so your logo never ends up underneath a Share button.
It can sit back a little
Full-strength white over bright footage can be shouty. Easing the opacity back to eighty or ninety percent lets the logo read as part of the film rather than a sticker on top of it. That control is yours.
It is permanent
Your logo is re-encoded into the pixels of the finished video, not carried as a separate layer. There is no clean copy underneath and nothing anyone can switch off — which is the entire point of buying branded content rather than borrowing someone else's.
Got your file? Good.
Upload it once and it is on your account for every order from here on. Then all you have to do is choose which videos you want.