This page opens with 4 colours, Balanced smoothness and Transparent background ticked, the settings that fit most logos: the white box a logo was exported on is left out, and the rest keeps its flat colours.
Getting a clean logo SVG
- Use the biggest copy you have. A logo from an email signature or a favicon is only a few dozen pixels high, so the tracer has to guess its curves. A 500 to 2,000 pixel export from the website, a PDF or a print file gives far cleaner edges.
- Set the colours to what you see, counting the background too: it is traced first and then left out. A navy and orange logo on white is 3. If a small dot or line disappears, add a colour. If thin outlines of an odd shade appear around letters, take one away.
- Check the corners at 4×. Letters with sharp corners, like an E or a K, want Detailed; round, hand-drawn marks look best at Smooth.
- Download SVG, or Copy SVG code to paste the logo straight into a web page.
What makes a good vector logo
A good vector logo has one set of shapes per colour and as few curve points as its forms allow. Long straight stretches, like the stem of a T or the side of a badge, become single straight lines, and round forms become a handful of curves, so a typical logo needs a few dozen shapes and a few kilobytes. The summary below the preview gives both numbers: if a simple logo shows hundreds of shapes, it was probably saved as a small or heavily compressed JPG, and a better source file will trace cleaner.
Keep the traced SVG for places where a sharp, scalable logo matters: web pages, retina screens, signs, embroidery and print. If you ever get the designer’s original AI, EPS or SVG file, prefer it: it holds the exact fonts and curves that tracing can only approximate.