Where to find logos for technologies and tools?

Question

I often need to present about technologies and tools, and I am always wasting hours trying to find logos for various things. In particular, high resolution images with transparency seem to be almost a myth. Where do you find these technology/tool logos?

I find the following to be the order of ease to find logos (easiest to hardest):

1. Tools from a vendor, like SQL Server or Visual Studio, are fairly easy and generally high resolutions are available.

2. Logos for popular technologies, for example Java or .NET, are available too, but it is harder to find quality ones.

3. Open source tools are much harder to find. (jQuery is an example of one for which I recently just couldn't find their new logo.)

4. The worst are logos for specific technologies. At the moment I'm trying to find one for WinForms, SilverLight, and WPF—have only found Silverlight so far.

Answer 1

When I don't find a high-resolution logo, I vectorize a smaller one (e.g. with inkscape), then scale. This works well with simple logos, limited colours, no background, etc.

Answer 2

I also had this issue - I was trying to find the small-version of the Skype logo for a button. I eventually had to resort to Google images as the Skype website didn't offer the small-version. Even then these were fairly low quality images (fortunately I was scaling the image down to ~20px) however.

Answer 3

For Microsoft technologies official resource is MS Press Center

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/gallery.mspx

jQuery

http://docs.jquery.com/Design_and_Identity

Java and Sun - only if you send request to SUN

http://logos.sun.com/

and Google of course :)

Answer 4

Google Images and Wikipedia.

If I am desperate then I will try and recreate the image myself, but this is painful for complex images, but needs must, as they say

Answer 5

Google Image search?

Answer 6

If you have a small version of a logo you can use an image search engine like TinEye to look for a larger image.

Answer 7

Tool vendors and big technology companies (#1 #2) usually have press kits or logo download page.

• Microsoft Presspass has SQL Server, Visual Studio, .NET and Silverlight
• The Sun brand extranet has Java

Ohloh is a good database of open source (#3) products and their logos. Wakoopa also comes to mind for specific softwares and services. They may not be high-res though.

• Ohloh has jQuery

If you can't find a logo for a specific technology (#4), it may suffice to just show the cover image of a well-known reference book to let it serve as an eye-catcher, depending on the context in the presentation.

Answer 8

As a web/graphic designer I redraw and resize whatever I need, but if you have a tight time limit you can make a request to a vector/icon artist on deviantArt.

Some might just help you out.

Answer 9

Usually I start with Google, quick image search first, but then regular search (which always seems to bring better results - even if they are harder to sort through).

If I can't find a high-res image but find a small one I might attempt vectorizing a small one using Vector Magic. I just don't have the time or inclination to create them from scratch.

Failing that I'll drop the company an email. Remember it's advertising for the company/site/product, you might be surprised how many are happy to send you some graphics. The challenge is sending the email to right place. If the logo was really important I'd phone, but that hasn't happened yet.

I try not to spend more than 20-30 minutes on such tasks.

Answer 10

I'm a graphic designer as well so I come across this problem frequently for a wide range of logos. I've listed my suggestions in order of best to worst in terms of quality.

Option 1: The best case (if not the slowest) is to contact the PR department for the company as they will sometime provide what you need. This way you have the original file from the actual company any you aren't likely to end up in trouble for misuse of their logo. Some companies have pr portions on their website that provide links to download brand info as well as secondary image such as product stuff. eg: http://www.apple.com/pr/

Option 2: Wikipedia. They have SVG images for many of the companies out there and you can download them and use them.

Option 3: Online PDFs. Many companies provide PDFs online. If they have their logo on the PDF you can open it up in Acrobat, Illustrator, etc and snag the logo. If they used a vector logo, you can grab the vector objects themselves and save them in a new file.

Option 4: Sketchy logo websites such as http://www.brandsoftheworld.com/ have a large collection of logos from around the world. The legality of these websites are not for me to contest but they do have a large selection.

Option 5: Google Images. I consider this a last resort. These are often low-res, usually JPG and almost always second-hand. They are listed here because someone else used it on their website so you can't guarantee the accuracy of the logo. You often times need to remove the background or try and make it match your background.

Answer 11

Wikimedia Commons, Google Image Search or Ohloh (for open source projects). Anyway, I prefer SVG and encourage that every logo be released in vector format.

Answer 12

Try http://www.allfreelogo.com/ for the common things. Or a google search with "site:domain.com filetype:pdf" and extract.

Answer 13

Get ahold of their marketing department, tell them you would like some high-quality logos to serve as the sprinkles atop the icing on your presentation next week.

Be sure to highlight the fact that this presentation includes points of why their service/product is vital to your companies success.

Be sure to leave the door open about contacting them when it comes time for your company to make the purchase.

If none of this applies to you, do it anyway and don't feel guilty. The marketing department would do the same to you.

Answer 14

Google images is the best. Just set the required size + try some different keywords & voila most logos are available. But I don't know if this could lead to copyright infringements.