What’s the difference between a .jpeg and a .jpg?
The answer is just 1 letter; other than that, they are the same! Read the full transcript of this podcast or listen below.
00:00 – Linda Fitzpatrick (Host)
Welcome to the Design Helpline, the podcast that helps turn your business ideas into a real live brand. Whether you’re just starting out, feeling behind on tech or lack confidence in your creative muscle, the Design Helpline is where you’ll find practical tips, straightforward answers and proven strategies to help you win with your business. I’m Linda Fitzpatrick and I’m here to help you style your brand. Hello and welcome to the Design Helpline. I’m Linda Fitzpatrick and I’m here to help you, the small business owner, create a brand you love that connects with your ideal customers. Today is the very first episode and I’m going to dive into a really important topic the different file formats that you need for your logo. The reason I’m doing this is because I’ve got a free checklist that’s on my website that people can download, and in it one of the first things is the different formats that you need for your logo. This checklist is the checklist that I use all the time for my own projects or for other people’s projects if I’m working on those. So when I done the checklist, I sent it out to some people who I knew would find it useful, and they said, oh my god, this is amazing, but we’ve no idea what those formats are. So I’m gonna explain that here. I know it sounds a bit technical, but stick with me, it’s gonna be really useful and I’ll keep it kind of light and easy to understand. So you’ve got your logo done and maybe you had a designer do it. And if you did have a designer do it, I’m sure that they’ll send you these file formats and, in any case, you know that they’re the ones that you need to request. If you’ve done it yourself, then it’s even more important to make sure that you’ve got the right formats so that, no matter what the occasion, you can use your logo and show it off to the world. So the key formats that I am going to go through are your eps file, your png file, your jpeg, an svg file and a pdf. I’m going to put a pdf in there because, even though it’s a document format, it’s very, very used, so it’s handy to know exactly what it’s for and what it means.
02:01
So let’s break all of these down and start first of all with the EPS file. The EPS is the oldest of these formats and it stands for Encapsulated Postscript File. That’s EPS. This was a format that was created by Adobe Systems back in about 1987, when desktop publishing was becoming a big deal and designers needed a way to save and print high quality graphics. Eps files are vector based, and what that means is they can be scaled to any size that you want without losing quality. A vector file is basically a mathematical formula file where every piece of data there is represented by a mathematical formula, and if you want to make it twice the size, it just multiplies out by two. If you want to scale it to a hundred times the size, every single piece of the formula multiplies out, and so you don’t lose any quality, and it’s really an essential file format for anybody who wants to be able to use their logo in any scenario needs.
03:06
You’d use this. If you imagine, if you’re a sponsor of the Olympics or something and it was going to be blown up into a huge, big resolution, then you’d use that. There it’s also a file that holds all the data, so it’s where, if you wanted to make changes to your logo in the future, it’s where you’d go to edit it. It’s an absolute must-have for high quality prints logo in the future. It’s where you’d go to edit it. It’s an absolute must have for high quality prints or large scale designs, and it’s really what I’d consider one of the core logo formats that everybody needs to have.
03:34
The next format that I’m going to look at is your JPEG file, your JPEG or your JPG. One of my very early questions and it seemed like a silly question at the time and it took me an awfully long time to actually ask this question was are those two the same thing? And they are. They’re the exact same thing, except one has three letters and one has four letters, and the reason that one has three letters and one has four letters is quite simply that it was four letters when it was first developed back in 1992, during the early days of the internet, and after that three letter extensions became the common format and so it was shortened to jpg. Jpeg stands for Joint Photographic Expert Group, and this format was developed in about 1992 by that group. That group is a committee that’s made up of experts from a variety of industries, like designers, photographers, software experts, and they developed that format to handle photographic images which were starting to be shared online during the early days of the internet.
04:37
So JPEGs are all about compressing images to make them a smaller file size, to make the internet be able to handle and render them, and this means that they load quite quickly on websites, which is really essential for any website. The downside of a JPEG is it uses lossy compression, and what this means is that it doesn’t hold all of your data. Some of the image quality is sacrificed in order to keep the file size down, but if you have a correctly sized JPEG, if it’s appropriate for its end destination whether it’s for print or for use online or for use for social media this won’t matter. So JPEGs are perfect for social media posts, for websites, for online portfolios, and if you want your logo to load really fast, you might use a JPEG, but most of the time for logos, it would be recommended that you use a dot PNG.
05:33
Png stands for portable network graphic. This was developed in 1996 to replace the GIF, which is still around, of course, for animations and that and a PNG file can’t be animated, but it is a higher quality. So as the internet continued to grow, there was a need for higher quality images that didn’t lose data. Pngs don’t lose data, so your image stays high quality and this makes them really great for logos. They also support transparency, which is really useful because it means that you can place your logo on different backgrounds without it having any white bounding boxes and without having to create a different file with a different color background for every single usage. They’re great for websites, presentations, for general use anywhere. You need a crisp, clear image. Most of the time when you’re using your logo online or in a document. A PNG is the perfect format. If you want to use it in a very large size, maybe you’d choose a JPEG with a custom background color, but most of the time a dot PNG is exactly what you need to use your logo pretty much anywhere.
06:41
Next up, I’m going to look at svg files. Svg files are somewhat similar to EPS files. They’re scalable vector graphics and, just like EPSs, they can be scaled infinitely. There are a couple of differences in how they handle transparencies. And that are a couple of differences in how they handle transparencies and that, but the real reason that I want to mention them here is because you can use Canva to export an SVG file, and that means that if you’re making your logo yourself and you make it in Canva, then you can export an SVG file and if you ever do get to sponsoring the Olympics, then a designer will most likely be able to open that for you in a program that deals with EPS files, like Adobe Illustrator, and they’ll be able to save and export your SVG file as an EPS. Svg files were developed by the World Wide Web Consortium in about 2001, because there was a need for a format that could be interactive and scalable, so you can actually use SVG files online. Even though a lot of platforms don’t accept them Technically, it’s possible to use them, so that if you were scaling infinitely your logo online, the SVG file would be the format that would. That would allow it to hold its quality and its crispness.
07:57
So, finally, I want to take a look at the PDF file, which is quite ubiquitous and in use everywhere PDF files. They’re not a file that you’d use for a local format, but they’re still worth a mention here because they’re such a common format. Pdf stands for portable document format. Adobe again created this back in 1992 or 93. They were designed to make it easy to share documents across different computer systems without losing any formatting. So this means that you can position text and photos and graphics and that when you export your PDF file, it’s going to arrive to the person whom you send it to looking exactly as you sent it. Pdfs are great for making sure that your brand information or your brochure or your booklet arrives looking exactly as you sent it. So those are the key formats that I recommend.
08:48
If you want to download the checklist that has got all of these formats and lots, lots more information for the basics that you need to create a great startup brand, go to diydesignclub.com/freebies and you’ll find all of my free stuff there. So let’s recap on that. You need an EPS or an SVG, a scalable vector file or an encapsulated postscript file that means that your logo can be scaled to any size. You need a PNG with a transparent background, and a JPEG is handy to have as well. And remember, you need these if you’re going to be using your logo in different colours, or in a black version, a white version. You need one of these for each version that you’re going to be using. So that’s it.
09:32
I hope you found this useful. I’m going to base future episodes around the questions that I get asked day in, day out. If you’d like to ask me any questions, just shoot me a message on Instagram. The link is in the show notes. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you found this episode useful, be sure to click subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. I’ll be back answering questions, no-transcript. If you found it useful, share it with somebody else who might also find it useful. I hope it wasn’t too technical for you. I’m going to base future episodes around questions that I get asked day in, day out, and if you’ve got any questions, shoot me a a message on Instagram, which you’ll find in the show notes below, or send me a message using the contact form.
Or send me a message using the contact form on my website, diydesignclub.com
Thank you so much for tuning in.
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