Press releases, comparison posts, customer stories, conference slides. You end up placing someone else’s logo more often than you expect, and every time the same two questions stall the work: am I allowed to use this, and which file am I supposed to use?
The test is short. Is the file from an official source, have you left its shape alone, and does it have room around it? This article takes those three checks down to the level of detail you can actually apply.
Find the official source first
The first step is not searching for an image, it is identifying where the logo is published. Files pulled from an image search or a roundup article are often downscaled, or several rebrands out of date. Using last generation’s logo is as wrong as recolouring the current one.
Work down this list and you will usually find the real thing quickly:
- A “Brand”, “Press”, “Media kit” or “Logo” link in the company’s site footer
- The asset bundle attached to their press release
- Their brand guidelines, frequently distributed as a PDF
- If none of that exists, ask their contact address directly
A directory of official kits, such as the one on MediaKit™, is another place to look. The distributing side of this is covered in why your logo needs a public download page.
Alterations that are never acceptable
A logo is not stock art; it is the mark that identifies a company. Touch anything that carries that identity and it stops being their logo. Even without their guidelines in front of you, treat the following as off limits.
Don’t
Change the colour. Converting to greyscale or a solid white also counts unless a version like that is published.
Stretch it. Dragging one edge to make it fit is the single most common accident.
Add effects: shadows, glows, outlines, rotation.
Rearrange the symbol and wordmark, or crop out part of the mark.
Crop a horizontal lockup into a square, or round its corners, to fit a social avatar slot.
Do
Scale it up or down with the aspect ratio locked.
Pick from the published lockups: horizontal, stacked, symbol only.
Switch between the light-background and dark-background versions they provide.
One rule covers the edge cases: if you produced a form they do not publish, you altered the logo. If you need a knocked-out white version and there isn’t one, ask for it rather than making it.
Clear space: keep the surroundings empty
Clear space (also called the isolation area) is the margin around a logo where nothing else is allowed. It is not only about looking tidy — it stops adjacent elements from reading as part of the mark itself.
Guidelines usually express it in terms of the logo’s own geometry: “half the height of the symbol”, “the x-height of the wordmark”. That is deliberate, because the margin has to grow with the logo, which a fixed pixel value would not do.
When you cannot find a specification, half the height of the symbol on all four sides satisfies almost every guideline in practice. Too much space is never the complaint; too little is.
Kits published on MediaKit™ draw the clear-space figure from the real logo and state the unit it is measured in. How to read one is in the download guide.
Minimum size and background
Minimum size
Below a certain size the details collapse and the mark stops being legible. Guidelines typically set a floor per medium — “at least 24px wide on screen”, “at least 15mm wide in print”. For very small surfaces such as business cards or merchandise, check whether a symbol-only version exists instead of squeezing in the full lockup.
Background
For backgrounds, contrast is the whole question. Placing a logo straight onto a photograph fails because the brightness underneath changes across the mark, so no version reads cleanly. The standard fix is to lay a solid panel behind the logo area rather than hunting for a version that survives the photo.
Trademark and copyright — what each one protects
Two different rights sit on a logo at the same time. Conflating them leads to the wrong call.
Trademark
Trademark law is concerned with confusion about origin. Using someone’s mark to identify your own goods or services infringes. Using it to refer to them — what is generally called nominative or referential use — does not undermine that function and is broadly accepted: naming the subject of a comparison, identifying a client, showing who a product integrates with.
Copyright
The artwork itself may also carry copyright (rarely for pure wordmarks, more readily for distinctive symbols). That right is about copying, independent of any confusion. Reproducing a mark for reporting, criticism or research can still be permissible as quotation where the usual conditions — necessity, attribution — are met.
When to ask, and how
Stating a fact is generally done without asking. What does require a conversation is any use that implies a relationship:
- Putting their logo on your product or packaging so it reads as a partnership or certification
- Using it in a context that suggests endorsement, unless you actually have one
- Adopting another company’s logo as a recurring element in your own templates or icons
What about a customer logo wall?
The most common question of all. Showing that a real relationship exists is referential use, but a logo wall also reads as endorsement, so asking first is the professional standard — and many companies say so explicitly in their trademark policy, requiring written approval before you list them as a customer.
Decide up front what happens when the relationship ends. Logos left on a customer page years after the contract lapsed is a routine and avoidable embarrassment.
Four things to put in the request
Give them everything needed to decide, and the exchange takes one round trip instead of four.
- Where it will appear — the actual URL or publication, not just “our website”
- How it will look — surrounding copy, whether other logos sit beside it, rough size. Attach a screenshot if you have one
- For how long, and that you will remove it when that ends
- Which file you intend to use, from their official set
Whether or not their guidelines demand prior approval, having a record of the exchange has value on its own.
Pre-publish checklist
Run these six in order before anything ships:
- The file came from the official source
- It is the current logo, not one lifted from an old article
- Colour, proportions and effects are untouched
- Clear space is preserved around it
- It is displayed at or above the minimum size
- There is enough contrast against the background
Read the list from the other direction and it becomes the set of questions the company distributing the logo should have already answered. How easy those answers are to find maps directly onto how often the mark gets used wrongly — see brand guidelines for small teams for how to write them down.