A business owner recently designed her logo in Canva and contacted me. She needed her new logo converted to line art for a particular project.

Few people realize that different logo sizes and file types are necessary for many business-related items such as brochures, web, print, business cards, advertising, logo enlargement, flyers, billboards, posters, and apparel.

Canva is an easy-to-use online design program used mainly by small business owners and bloggers. Canva can be used to quickly create various social media posts, with pre-made templates that do not require design skills. Canva also advertises that you can create logos with their app, but should you?

If you are a graphic designer, you should NEVER use Canva to create logos. It’s one thing for an unwitting business owner to use Canva and another for a graphic designer.

Logos should always be designed in Adobe Illustrator, allowing logos to be saved as raster and vector images and as many file types as possible. Canva only creates raster images and one file type.

A photograph is an example of a raster image. Zoom in on a raster image to see lots of tiny squares called pixels that make up the image. Zooming in even further causes the image to become more pixelated, meaning the enlargement has reached a point where there is no more detail to see. Instead of a raster image becoming sharper, it becomes blurry.

Vector images, also called line art, are computer-generated paths created with a graphic design program, Adobe Illustrator. When vector images are resized or edited, their lines automatically recalculate, ensuring they never become pixelated or blurry – meaning they’re always in the highest resolution possible. If you zoom in on a vector image, it will always look sharp.

Not only does Canva only create raster images, when you download your finished design, it is a low-quality resolution. What does that mean? When you download your completed logo from Canva, it is 500 x 500 pixels. That means while your logo looks beautiful online, your logo will print at 1.667 x 1.667 inches in size, which is very small. That is the largest size that your logo will print clearly.

Lastly, you want your logo to be unique to your business. The purpose of a logo is to put a face on your one-of-a-kind brand, different from everyone else. With thousands of people using the same template and image-based Canva logo designs, it defeats the purpose of a logo. The templates and stock images are not exclusive to any business and can never be trademarked.

I highly recommend you hire a graphic designer experienced with Adobe Illustrator to create your new business logo. Ask for your logo in a variety of sizes and file types, including .eps, .jpg, .png, and .pdf.