Logo design for a business — copyright, trade marks, and the files you need

Logo design for a business ends in two things: a file, and the rights to that file. The file is the easy part. Handing over a file doesn't, by itself, transfer the rights to it: the copy and the rights are two separate things. The EU leaves the rules on how copyright is transferred to its member states, so exactly how an assignment has to be made depends on your country. Without a clear assignment, you have, at most, a licence. Elements from Canva's library can't be used as part of a trade mark, because Canva's own licence forbids it. A mark generated entirely by AI may carry no copyright protection at all, in which case copyright gives you no way to stop someone else copying it.

That's why the route you take to a logo — a designer, a generator, or Canva — is a decision about rights, not only about looks and budget. It decides what has to be in the contract with a designer, whether the mark can be registered as a trade mark at the EUIPO, and which files you'll get for a favicon, Google and your business profiles. Filing an EU trade mark online in one class costs €850 at EUIPO — our walkthrough of that fee table is further down.

Colours, typography, clear space and minimum size are the rules of the system the logo works inside; we cover those in brand guidelines.

Three routes to a logo, and what each one gives you in rights

Each of the three common routes gives you a file, but only one can give you exclusive economic rights to the mark — and only if you sign the right contract.

• A designer or studio. If the logo is original enough to count as a protected work, the rights belong to its creator. They pass to you only through a contract that assigns them; without one, you hold at most a licence, on terms that depend on national law.
• A logo generator (e.g. Looka). You pay for the right to download and use a finished design. The terms don't speak directly to a transfer of copyright or to exclusivity, and symbols may come from third parties.
• Canva. Library elements (icons, illustrations, templates) come under a non-exclusive licence, and you can't use them as part of a trade mark. Fonts are the exception.

On top of that sits a cross-cutting question: if a mark was generated entirely by AI, there may be no copyright in it at all, whatever tool it was made in.

A logo from a designer: what the contract must say

Commissioning a logo from a designer or studio buys you work and a file; you buy the economic rights separately, and only when the contract meets a few specific conditions. The EU has no single directive spelling out exactly how a copyright transfer must be documented — InfoSoc Directive 2001/29/EC, recital 30 states that rights "may be transferred, assigned or subject to the granting of contractual licences, without prejudice to the relevant national legislation on copyright and related rights." In plain terms: form, scope and default presumptions for a rights transfer are set nationally, so the exact requirement — written form or not, what counts as proof — depends on the member state you're contracting in. Whatever your national rule turns out to be, getting the assignment in writing is our own advice for proof, not a claim about what any particular country's law requires.

One EU-level fact does apply everywhere: under the DSM Directive (EU) 2019/790, Art. 18(1), when authors license or transfer their exclusive rights, they're entitled to "appropriate and proportionate remuneration" — though Art. 18(2) leaves member states free to use different mechanisms for that, and Art. 19 adds a yearly transparency obligation on how the work has been used. The mechanism that holds regardless of jurisdiction: handing over a file is not the same as transferring the rights to it; name the uses you need (print, web, trade mark, modifications) explicitly in the contract; and get the assignment in writing, because that's what you'll need as proof later.

From that, a short list of clauses worth checking before you sign:

1. The contract says it assigns the economic rights, not just "grants a licence" or "hands over the design".
2. The work is described precisely: the mark, with the variants you're receiving as files.
3. The uses are spelled out explicitly: print, digital reproduction, web, use on goods and services, advertising, distribution of copies.
4. There's consent for derivative works and later changes — a simplified favicon version, a refresh a few years on — or an assignment of the right to authorise them.
5. Payment covers every use you've listed.
6. (Our own recommendation.) The designer confirms the work contains no elements a third party holds rights to, such as icons from a non-exclusively licensed library.
7. The contract is signed in a form valid in your jurisdiction — check what that means locally before relying on an e-mail "I agree" or a click-through acceptance.

How to brief a designer in the first place — purpose, audience, constraints — is covered in the project brief.

A free logo: Canva and generators

A free logo can be made in a few minutes, but the tools' own licences directly limit what you can do with it afterwards. The sharpest limit concerns trade marks.

Canva. The Canva Content License Agreement (read 2 October 2026; the page states no effective date) defines "Content" as its library of photos, icons, illustrations, video, audio, fonts and templates. Point 9, among the banned uses of both free and paid Content, lists using "any of the Content as part of a trade-mark, design-mark, trade-name, business name or service mark (excluding fonts)". The same point bans claiming you authored the Content or hold exclusive rights to it.

In practice, a logo built from a Canva library icon, illustration or template can't, under the licence, serve as a trade mark — and the licence is non-exclusive either way: free Content comes under a "perpetual, non-exclusive" licence, paid Content under a non-exclusive licence for use in a single project. The same element can end up in someone else's logo. Canva also reserves the right to "cancel or change" licences (point 1), and point 12 grants no rights or warranties over trade marks and logos that appear within free Content. At the same time, the Terms of Use, dated 19 August 2026, list a logo among the things you can design in Canva. A tool for designing a logo, and a licence to use it as a trade mark, are two different things.

If you use Canva's AI features, the AI Product Terms, dated 26 June 2026 apply. Under them, "you own your Output" in your relationship with Canva — except for output that modifies or includes licensed library Content. The same terms note outputs "may not be unique", and other users may receive similar results. The ownership clause splits rights between you and Canva "to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law" — it doesn't create copyright where the law doesn't grant it (see the next section), and doesn't guarantee your mark is one of a kind.

Looka. Looka's Terms, last updated 29 March 2019 and governed by Ontario law, state that to download or use a design outside the service, "you must pay the Fee." Once paid, you have no right to the session's other designs or to using individual elements separately. The terms recommend checking elements don't infringe third-party rights, and say symbols from The Noun Project are used "AT YOUR OWN RISK." They also acknowledge that some fonts and symbols may be third-party licensed. There's no clause transferring copyright, and none promising exclusivity on a paid design — the terms only speak to a right to use it.

The takeaway: free and cheap tools are fine for a sketch, a name test, or a placeholder mark for the first few months. If you're planning to register a trade mark, the mark can't rest on library elements whose licence rules that out.

A logo from an AI generator: does anyone hold rights to it

A mark generated entirely by AI may carry no copyright protection, whatever the tool's terms say about "ownership" of the output. The most detailed treatment comes from the United States; in the EU there's a summary of member states' positions, not a rule.

The US Copyright Office's report, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2, dated 29 January 2025, finds that protection "does not extend to purely AI-generated material" — material generated solely by AI, or where a human didn't control the creative elements. Prompts alone, with current technology, "do not alone provide sufficient control." What can be protected is the human contribution visible in the result: creative selection, arrangement or edits, assessed case by case. Limitation: this is US law and doesn't bind an EU court.

At EU level, a Council of the EU presidency summary dated 20 December 2024 (document 16710/1/24 REV 1) collected member states' answers. No member state reported legislation or guidance on protecting AI-generated content specifically, and three reported court decisions on AI and copyright — one of them about a logo made with AI: a supreme court in one member state held that using AI doesn't by itself rule out protection, and that the human contribution has to be assessed case by case. The summary notes a general view that a work can only be protected with significant human input, and a clear understanding that only a natural person should be able to be an author — so output generated purely by AI can't be protected. It's a summary of positions, not law.

The practical consequence: if there's no copyright in a mark, you can't use copyright to stop someone else copying something similar. If you use AI, document your own contribution — selections, edits, the final layout. Protection for the mark itself, separate from copyright, comes through registering a trade mark, covered next.

Trade-mark registration: EUIPO

A trade mark is a separate protection for the sign that identifies your goods or services, independent of whether the logo is a protected work — but exclusive rights only exist once it's registered, and only in the classes you file for. Filed online in one class, an application costs €850 at EUIPO (read 2 October 2026): €850 basic fee, €50 for a second class, €150 for each class from the third. The basic fee has to be paid within one month of EUIPO receiving the application, and fees are non-refundable. Registration runs for 10 years and can be renewed indefinitely.

A trade mark doesn't replace the rights to the design itself. If using the mark infringes someone else's rights — a designer's copyright they never assigned, for instance — that person can oppose the application or seek cancellation afterwards. A proper contract with the designer is a precondition for a safe registration, not an alternative to one.

Small and medium-sized EU businesses can apply to the SME Fund 2026, running from 2 February to 4 December 2026: savings on filing fees reach "as much as 75%", depending on your country or region. The fund is only for "EU-based" small and medium-sized enterprises, so check eligibility directly against the scheme.

National trade-mark offices exist too, with their own fees and procedures that vary by country — a mechanism worth knowing about, without a single figure that holds across the EU: check your own country's office before assuming EUIPO is the only route.

How to design a business logo, step by step

Order matters, because the most expensive mistakes — colliding with someone else's mark, and missing out on the rights — only surface at the end if you haven't checked for them at the start. The sequence below follows from what's covered above.

1. Settle who the brand is for. Who the customer is, what they need, and who they compare you against — covered in business model. The character of the mark follows from this, not the other way round.
2. Check the name before you commission a mark. National business registers plus the EU and international trade-mark databases are the mechanism — TMview and EUIPO eSearch plus cover marks registered across the EU and beyond.
3. Plan the variants. A primary and simplified version, colour and monochrome, positive and negative — what variants a system actually needs is covered in brand guidelines.
4. Test the mark at a small size. Google accepts a favicon from as small as 8×8 pixels, and a Facebook avatar is cropped to a circle — a mark that doesn't hold up under those conditions needs a simplified version.
5. Write the designer's brief. Purpose, audience, constraints and a list of carriers — details in the project brief.
6. Collect the files in the set covered in the next section.
7. Sign the rights-assignment contract with the clauses from the contract section above.
8. Consider registering a trade mark at EUIPO or your national office, in the classes you actually operate in.

Logo files, favicon and sizes across platforms

The minimum file set is a vector and a raster version, in colour and monochrome, positive and negative, in RGB for screen and CMYK for print. Public institutions that publish their logos ship them the same way: the European Commission offers its logo in versions "developed for print material (CMYK) and digital material (RGB)", and its 2025.1 guidelines list horizontal, vertical and muted ("mute") versions. For a small business, that translates to: a vector file (SVG, PDF or AI), a transparent-background PNG, colour and single-colour versions, positive and negative, RGB for screen and CMYK for print.

Favicon on Google. Google Search Central (updated 28 August 2026, read 2 October 2026) requires a square favicon of at least 8×8 pixels and recommends a size "larger than 48x48px" so it holds up across different surfaces. Supported formats are BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM and TIFF — SVG is not on that list. Google supports one favicon per site, understood as a hostname, so a subdomain has its own and a subdirectory doesn't. The file's address should stay stable, Googlebot needs access to both the favicon and the homepage, and showing the favicon in results is never guaranteed even when every guideline is met. Re-crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.

Logo for Google in structured data. The logo property on Organization structured data helps Google choose the logo it shows in results and the knowledge panel. The guidelines (updated 8 September 2026) require an image of at least 112×112 pixels in a format supported by Google Images, and tell you to check how the logo looks on a plain white background — a light or grey logo can disappear on one. Google Images supports BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG and AVIF, so SVG works for a logo in structured data and on the page itself, just not as a favicon.

LinkedIn. The LinkedIn Help page (read 2 October 2026) gives a minimum of 268×268 pixels and a recommended 400×400 for a company page's logo, and 1,512×256 for the cover photo. All images must be PNG or JPEG, up to 3 MB. The logo is shown on both light and dark backgrounds, and a transparent one lands on white, so LinkedIn recommends checking both variants.

Facebook. Facebook Help (undated page, read 2 October 2026) recommends a 320×320-pixel profile photo and warns it's "cropped to a circle", so your mark needs to work within that shape. For images with a logo or text, PNG tends to give better results. A cover photo needs at least 400×150 pixels, and the fastest-loading option is an sRGB JPG at 851×315 pixels under 100 KB.

Whether and how a business should run its social-media presence is covered separately in social media.

A logo is one of the later purchases a new business makes, not the first — after the name, the domain, the mailbox and the first clients. The full order, from week zero to the first employee, is set out in technology for a new business.