Your app/product is identified by its logo. It shows up on many places like store, device home screen, lock screen, app tiles and in the app itself. Putting effort and time in designing app logo is important since a strong logo design results in an equally strong branding.
While submitting your app, you may need to include several versions of your app logo to support different sizes and screen resolutions. Scaling up or down your app logo to fit different sizes may make it lose its clarity.
Why use Vector graphics?
Images can be represented in two ways — Raster graphics and Vector graphics.
In Raster graphics, images are represented as arrays of pixels and thus they scale with loss of clarity.
In Vector graphics, geometrical objects inclusive of points, lines, curves, circles or other shapes are used to form an image based on mathematical expressions. Therefore vector-based images can be scaled indefinitely without degrading.
Using a vector graphics editor, you can also export images to raster graphics like PNG at different resolutions.
Free Vector Graphics Editors
Adobe Illustrator is the go-to vector graphics editor for designing app logos. However, if you are looking for free alternatives to Illustrator, check the following list.
Inkscape
Inkscape is a professional vector graphics editor available for Windows, Mac OS X as well as Linux. It’s open source software licensed under the GPL.
And whenever I need to design app icons, logos or vector graphic assets, I always turn to Inkscape.
Here are some useful Inkscape tutorials to get you started:
- How to work with Inkscape Interpolate extension
- Create flat long shadow app icon in Inkscape
- How to Create Snowflakes in Inkscape
- Create Clouds in Inkscape
Figma
Figma is a web-based collaborative interface design tool that comes with a free starter plan. It comes with vector networks, arc tool, advanced font features and support for SVG. Explore its design features in detail.
Gravit Designer
Gravit Designer is a free vector design application for creating illustrations, icons, UI design, presentations, or social media graphics. It presents clean, intuitive interface and can be used to design any kind of vector graphics. You can use it in the browser for free or go with the Pro plan to download app for your favorite platform (Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS) and use it offline.
SVG-Edit
SVG-edit is a fast, web-based, JavaScript-driven SVG drawing editor that works in any modern browser.
Vectr
Vectr is a vector graphics editor available online and on your desktop across multiple platforms – Mac, Windows, Linux and Chromebook. In above screenshot, you can see its online editor.
Do also check our collection of free Graphic Design Software for Beginners. Know of any free vector graphics editor that we can add to this list, let us know in the comments below. Thank you!
If you are working on a logo design project, you may want to check out our collection of the best free logo fonts and free logo mockups.