Show HN: Free Company Logo API

I honestly thought this was going to generate a free logo and got really excited for some unknown reason? I guess I was wondering how it all worked, then I clicked through and it made way more sense. That was a wild ride!

Killer work Alex! It&#x27;s crazy you just rolled this out. We have been in development on something very similar but have yet to make a public push on the product. The main difference is we host the vector source file and build rasters from it. This helps maintain top quality at any size, and allows us to output to additional formats (i.e. PDF).<p>The product is still in alpha, but it&#x27;s amazing how many similarities we came to with the URL scheme design. For example, image embedding:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;img.ogol.io&#x2F;&lt;domain.com&gt;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;img.ogol.io&#x2F;&lt;domain.com&gt;</a> example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;img.ogol.io&#x2F;ogol.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;img.ogol.io&#x2F;ogol.io</a><p>we also support downloading<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.ogol.io&#x2F;&lt;domain.com&gt;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.ogol.io&#x2F;&lt;domain.com&gt;</a> example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.ogol.io&#x2F;ogol.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.ogol.io&#x2F;ogol.io</a><p>Each logo also has it&#x27;s own page to make working with the asset outside of an API easy.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ogol.io&#x2F;ogol.io&#x2F;nn0ymd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ogol.io&#x2F;ogol.io&#x2F;nn0ymd</a><p>Our approach requires companies to confirm their domains and associate a vector logo with the domain. Your strategy obviously provides a lot of logos right out of the gates. Logos are such a pain to deal with, it&#x27;s great to see the problem being attacked from a few different angles.

Instead of relying on FB, Twitter, Company&#x27;s site for the logo, wouldn&#x27;t it be better to create a &quot;Company Logo Service&quot; with an API, with the below features -<p>0. Change at one place, make it work everywhere. (consistent branding across the wild web).<p>1. Upload your company logo here with us.<p>2. Multiple versions.<p>3. Multiple sizes.<p>4. Control and Connect various sizes, versions with your various social accounts, newsletters, anything.<p>5. IFTTT support.<p>6. Get it printed on swag and merchandise.<p>7. More...?

And when you use it, they get to collect all of the data about your visitors.

Had to do it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;piedpiper.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;piedpiper.com</a>

This has been done before (and posted to HN), and it had the same problem. Way too many false positives, especially with older sites.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;starfoods.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;starfoods.com</a>

Hey Alex,<p>This is pretty sweet. Nice job! Is there a post where you talk about the tech behind this API? I&#x27;ve been working on a simple API that finds domain names from company names that I use on projects where I use business intelligence APIs like Clearbit and FullContact.

There has to be some level of fair use or copyright involved, no? You are taking corporate images, modifying them, and then distributing their modified brand&#x2F;logo potentially without their consent. If they don&#x27;t like the results, they could sue you.<p>Or at least, I feel that would be the case.

As a developer of a URL shortening service, this is incredibly useful. Social platforms scrape the contents of all shared URLs to offer a preview in a feed. With this service I can incorporate the logo of a site&#x27;s destination URL into the scraped content.

Yet another (hilarious?) false match: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;exxon.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;exxon.com</a>

I&#x27;d be cool if they would provide some insight on how to make an existing website to work with their API. I always wanted to know what&#x27;s the &quot;standard&quot; way to put a logo in the webpage. Some people uses just an IMG tag, other uses an H1 with an image replacement technique.

Worked on something similar on a local open data hackathon before, but instead I used a scraper to parse the logos.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;c0dr&#x2F;LogoParser" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;c0dr&#x2F;LogoParser</a><p>It worked okay for like 40% of the sites, and for the rest of the sites we used Python and scikit-learn to detect the logo from the page (threw all images of the page in the script and it returned if it was a logo or not). And this actually worked quite good, irrc over 90% of the test cases worked.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tomsrocket&#x2F;image-classification" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tomsrocket&#x2F;image-classification</a><p>But yeah, using Twitter as a source might also be a good idea.

Pretty cool! I think the API docs could possibly be a bit more precise, though. Perhaps something like this:<p><pre><code> You can also pass us the following optional query parameters. Parameter Default Description size 128 integer Image size: Length of longest side, in pixels format &quot;png&quot; string File format, either &quot;png&quot; or &quot;jpg&quot; greyscale (not passed) boolean If this parameter is passed, image will be desaturated</code></pre>

Thinking perhaps we have something set up odd in our HTML that&#x27;s tripping up the API, but a bit confused why this seems to be returning nothing <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;korkapp.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;korkapp.com</a><p>Any thoughts anyone?

This is an excellent piece of marketing.

I know Glassdoor is using Facebook as a source of their company logos

How would a logo image file have to be named to be found by this?

This vaguely reminds me of Picons, which was the &#x27;90s solution to this problem (Gravatar for domains, but also for newsgroups and people):<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.indiana.edu&#x2F;pub&#x2F;faces&#x2F;picons&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.indiana.edu&#x2F;pub&#x2F;faces&#x2F;picons&#x2F;</a><p>If you&#x27;ve ever noticed the little logos on Gmane posts, they come from Picons and favicons.

Works great! But I do wonder where it came from... parsed the HTML, grabbed the SVG and converted it to PNG... or simply got it from Twitter?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;h5mag.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;h5mag.com</a> from... &lt;img class=&quot;logo&quot; src=&quot;&#x2F;img&#x2F;h5mag-logo.svg&quot; alt=&quot;logo H5mag&quot;&gt;

If you&#x27;re using Twitter as a source for company logos, you might be serving a lot of rainbow icons this week!

Late to the party, but this looks interesting.<p>Google does something similar for extracting favicons for any domain, such as <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;_&#x2F;favicon?domain=github.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;_&#x2F;favicon?domain=github.com</a>

I noticed that you are returning the company name in the title. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;fb.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;fb.com</a> .Is that intentional? Asking this because you provide a Company API too which is paid.

You need a better upscaling algorithm.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;alexa.com?size=512" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;alexa.com?size=512</a><p>Ideally all your logos should be in vector and rendered to any size (or at least powers of 2 for easier caching).

Maccman, Logaster offers own API which will generate logos. If you interested read more here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.logaster.com&#x2F;about-logaster&#x2F;api&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.logaster.com&#x2F;about-logaster&#x2F;api&#x2F;</a>

Hi. Nice idea. Images seem to be scaled not optimally though in same cases seeing jagged edges like here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;medigo.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;medigo.com</a>

Wish there was an equivalent service but with masked images of wine bottles. Always wanted to create something like Delicious Monster but for wine cellars. All the sites&#x2F;apps doing it are pretty ugly or largely text based.

Are there terms of service associated with this API? I can&#x27;t seem to find any.

Great API, thank you!<p>I made a little hubot script for this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npmjs.com&#x2F;package&#x2F;hubot-logo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npmjs.com&#x2F;package&#x2F;hubot-logo</a><p>Use it like this: hubot logo stripe.com

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;armadilloaerospace.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;armadilloaerospace.com</a> Where is the armadillo? I want my armadillo.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com</a>

That&#x27;s pretty dang cool. Might cause issues if clearbit ever looses the data and a bunch of websites link to it, but that&#x27;s pretty standard.

This is neat - it could use a background color option along with the ability to fill the logo with white.

Doesn&#x27;t work for my domain: zk.gd

Nice job. It would also be great if there is option to get image data that can be used in data-uri.

The trend is to have a different logo for apps and websites. another parameter might be helpful.

Where do companies like clearbit and full contact get their user data?

Isn&#x27;t that what the favicon.ico in the root of your site for?

Works great! Minor nitpick: Returns the old logo for Oculus.com

Brilliant, this is helpful for building MVP products as well!

uhh... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;amazon.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;amazon.com</a>

Internal error for <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;taodyne" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;taodyne</a> :-( We recently chàged server, that might be why.

This is great I will have to remember it.

Great work! Very useful :)

Nice, seems super helpful.

seems a simple change to gravatar to allow registration and use of simply the domain name to host the Corp Logo would be a 10 minute change.

great!!!! really really great!

Awesome! Have wanted this for so long!

Brilliant!

Well done!

Just curious.. what do you guys use for API management to handle authentications, logging, rate-limiting, etc..<p>1. Open-source solutions like KONG (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mashape&#x2F;kong" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mashape&#x2F;kong</a>) or similar?<p>2. Built in house?<p>3. Commercial services such as Apigee, Mashery?

Surely there&#x27;s a trademark protection concern here.

arent there legal requirements about colors, sizes, and placement for logos? for instance you offer gray scale as a setting, i seem to recall all placement of MS logos requires approval and no altering of colors(i could be completely wrong)... are you protecting your users by disallowing them to use logos in ways that might upset the owner?

Great idea, but something tells me the companies whose logos are available won&#x27;t like it. It will be interesting to see how they react. Some will probably embrace it, but I can see some of the larger corps acting territorial.

Be careful with copyright issues. How do you make it work? Do you scrape them automatically or gather them from the brands marketing materials?<p>I tried different logos, and I find a few issues:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;mcdonalds.com?size=256" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;mcdonalds.com?size=256</a><p>Mcdonalds US logo background should be red (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aboutmcdonalds.com&#x2F;mcd&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;image_and_video_library&#x2F;logos.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aboutmcdonalds.com&#x2F;mcd&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;image_and_video_l...</a> )<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;bk.com?size=256" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logo.clearbit.com&#x2F;bk.com?size=256</a><p>The quality of that one is bad. Wikipedia&#x27;s one is a .svg : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:Burger_King_Logo.svg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:Burger_King_Logo.svg</a>