120k SVG logos, also available in PNG format | Hacker News Reader

120k SVG logos, also available in PNG format

vectorwiki.com

167 pointsastonfred26 comments

As others have pointed out, licensing is unclear. It would be nice if each logo could link the official branding guidelines page when possible. For example, here are Twitter[1] and Spotify[2] branding guidelines.

As for if you can freely distribute these logos, I would consult a lawyer. It could be fair use, but I would not risk it.

[1] https://about.twitter.com/en/who-we-are/brand-toolkit

[2] https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/general/design-a...

Thanks for your comment. Good idea re: the brand guidelines, I will share this suggestion with the team. We could add a dedicated field for that purpose. We also plan to add HEX / RGB Color references in the future. Users can download the logos to use them for non-commercial projects and, if appropriate, to link to their business partners, e.g. in the clients' / case studies section of their website (which is a typical use case). There is an informative notice on each image page.

> It could be fair use, but I would not risk it.

I've always wanted to know the answer to this. There are tons of themes and templates for websites that very obviously ignore the branding guidelines. I wonder if the guidelines are even enforceable.

If those guidelines are enforceable, isn't it risky for brands to ignore all the misuse? I'm assuming that falls under trademarks for enforcement, so, IMHO (not a lawyer), they're all risking their logomarks by having such onerous branding guidelines that no one wants to follow them and then also failing to police the resulting misuse.

I asked about this in some webdev communities a while back and the general consensus was that trying to follow the branding guidelines and asking for permission was a mistake. The feedback I got was that all you'd be doing is putting a target on your back.

"Fair use" is a copyright thing, not a trademark thing, so it's mostly irrelevant here. It could apply to the actual SVG XML, and belong to whoever drew it, this may not be the owner of the trademark.

IANAL, but in general anyone can use a trademark to refer to the thing that is trademarked. You can't use it where it could be confusing, so you can't open a restaurant and call it McDonalds. But you can publish a book or website called "My guide to McDonalds Restaurants" as long as it really was about McDonalds.

If this was accurate and legal, it would be super useful. I've worked on countless projects where the client was some large company and needed their official logo on a product. It often takes them a surprising amount of time to dig around and get the logo in its official form.

IANAL, but how is this possibly legal? Assuming it is magically legal, how do we know that the logos are accurate and not just some random person on the internet redrawing the logo from a bad scan?

This is also missing the info which would be in official branding guidelines around the exact PMS colors, and any whitespace requirements. Ideally there would be PMS numbers and sRGB values for each color. In addition to SVG and PNG, exporting in EPS and DXF would be helpful.

As far as I know, It’s only illegal if you reuse them for commercial purposes. Granted, that is most use cases. But if I wanted to say make a sports team logo vinyl sticker for my own car, that is legal.

The typical Fair Use exceptions apply. The primary concern is typically: does it appear that the company using the logo endorses the company represented by the logo?

I'd argue here that it doesn't, but would I risk a lawsuit on it?

I can't help thinking that if you care about exact colors and spacing you wouldn't be downloading the logo from a website like this one.

Shameless self promotion: I have a search engine for svg logos that includes Github, Wikipedia & a few others: https://logosear.ch/

I avoid legal conundrums by not hosting any of the images and just linking to the upstream host.

I'd love to add vectorwiki to the sources if you'd let me index it!

Interesting, how'd you obtain the license to freely distribute these? ;)

I looked at several logos and saw that they were missing the registered trademark or trademark symbols. Those shouldn't be removed when making the vector versions, as they're part of the logo.

There is also this https://worldvectorlogo.com/

Just adding a quick comment to mention that if you want to add your own SVG logo to the site, you can do it by submitting it via https://vectorwiki.com/upload Don't forget to add a short description, tags and a link. Cheers.

There seem to be some issues with relevance sorting. A search for "Microsoft" yields many "Microsoft" projects before the core "Microsoft" logo. Similar issues with other logos - you'd expect exact match to take precendence.

Thanks for your comment. We'll improve relevancy in the future.

Forgive my ignorance, I don't know a lot (anything) about licensing, but I see a lot of comments asking about licensing in particular. If this isn't legal, then what about icon packs for, for example, VSCode or Android Launchers and similar?

Now what we need is some plugin like Iconify [1] for Sketch to pick it up and allow inserting vectors from it right into a design file.

[1]: https://iconify.design/

Yep, that's a good idea. I'd like also to open it the other way to designers once it gets some traction. Step by step.

The search box suggested "spotify" and "twitter" as examples, both returned some duplicate results. Does the 120k number count those duplicates?

Searching for 'Airbnb' brings up the YCombinator logo (presumably because of the investment relationship). Still weird.

Ignoring that one, it came up with three airbnb logos, two of which are the same, and the third is the lone "belo" symbol.

33 results for "Facebook", most of which are emoji.

Guessing 120k is closer to 10k to 20k actual unique logos.

Are these all "hand made" or are they autogenerated in some way?

License?

There's two concerns here.

First, the license for the individual pieces of work. There's a generic "wiki" license on the site which essentially says they own everything save for "fair use", which muddy as heck.

What I'm talking about here is not the use of any particular likeness, but of the rendition of that license. Since you have an SVG file, that, in itself, is licensable content - like any software.

Next, is the actual use of the likenesses. If I get a Twitter logo from here, can I use it? That's more a trademark issue and probably falls under that umbrella.

But you can see how you may be allowed to use a likeness because of trademark policy, but not allowed to use THESE, SPECIFIC incarnations of a likeness.

Vice a versa, these folks may well let you use their likenesses, but the trademark issues prohibit it.

So, anyway, in the end, there's not a single license involved here, me thinks, but potentially two.

It's funny we're on "hackernews" and all of the comments are about licensing and legality (before you explain, I get why).

Fantastic resource which is sadly very America-centric. I searched multiple major Australian and NZ brands (Penright, Supercheap Auto, Marmite, Vegemite, Irwin, Bunnings, Enzed) with no or poor results. But every American brand I could think of is present.

Thanks for your kind words. Do not hesitate to suggest some additions. We've already added close to 100 user submissions over the last 3 days. It's also a nice way for some startups to gain a bit of exposure (you can provide a description and a link to your site).

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