How to Organize Marketing Assets, Logos, and Brand Files

August 15, 2026

The symptom of a disorganized brand folder isn't messiness. It's that the logo on your invoice is a different logo than the one on your website, and both are different from the one a printer used last year — because three people each found a file that looked right.

Brand files need more structure than most business files for one specific reason: they're used by people who aren't designers and can't tell a good file from a bad one at a glance.

Structure

05 Marketing/
  Brand/
    01 Logo/
      Primary/
      Secondary/
      Icon/
      _ARCHIVE-old-logos/
    02 Color & Type/
    03 Photography/
    04 Templates/
    05 Brand Guide/
    _HANDOFF PACK/

The two folders doing the most work are _ARCHIVE-old-logos and _HANDOFF PACK, and both start with an underscore so they sort to the extremes rather than mixing into the working folders.

Inside the logo folder: name by use, not by format

The mistake is organizing logo files by file type — a PNG folder, an SVG folder, an EPS folder. Non-designers don't know which format they need, so they open the first folder and take whatever's in it.

Organize by use case, and put the format in the filename:

01 Logo/Primary/
  logo-primary-full-color-RGB.svg
  logo-primary-full-color-RGB.png
  logo-primary-white-RGB.png
  logo-primary-black-RGB.png
  logo-primary-full-color-CMYK.eps
  logo-primary-full-color-CMYK.pdf

Four variants cover nearly everything: full colour, white (for dark backgrounds), black (for single-colour printing), and one-colour brand. Each in a screen format and a print format.

Then put a plain text file in the folder telling people which one to take:

WHICH FILE DO I NEED?

Website, email, slides, social  →  the .png or .svg (RGB)
Print, signage, merchandise     →  the .pdf or .eps (CMYK)
Dark background                 →  the -white version
Single-colour printing          →  the -black version

Never stretch. Never recolour. Never add effects.
Minimum clear space around the logo: the height of the icon.
Minimum size: 24px tall on screen, 10mm in print.

Six lines, and it prevents the majority of brand misuse in small businesses. The person about to put your logo in a supplier's directory listing is not going to read a 40-page brand guide. They will read the note in the folder they just opened.

The formats, briefly

SVG — vector, scales to any size without quality loss, ideal for web. Editable in design software.

EPS or AI — vector, what printers and manufacturers ask for. If someone asks for "vector," this is what they mean.

PDF — vector when exported correctly, universally openable. Good middle ground and often the safest thing to send when you're unsure.

PNG — raster, supports transparent backgrounds. The right choice for most everyday screen use. Export at 2–3× the size you need.

JPG — raster, no transparency, so a logo saved as a JPG has a white box around it. This is the format that ends up on things by accident. Consider not putting a JPG logo in the folder at all; if it isn't there, it can't be used.

RGB vs CMYK — RGB for anything on a screen, CMYK for anything printed. Sending an RGB file to a printer produces colour shifts that are usually noticeable and occasionally awful.

Archive old logos, don't delete them

_ARCHIVE-old-logos with a dated subfolder for each version, and a note at the top of the archive explaining when the change happened.

You need these because old materials keep circulating. A brochure from three years ago needs a reprint, a partner's website still shows the old mark, a legal document references the mark as it was. And if you ever registered a trademark on a previous version, the file matters legally.

Prefix them so they can't be grabbed by mistake: ARCHIVED-DO-NOT-USE-logo-2019.png. Filenames are the only warning label that travels with a file.

Color and type, written down as values

02 Color & Type/brand-values.txt:

COLORS
Deep green   HEX #0F6E56   RGB 15/110/86    CMYK 86/23/60/6   Pantone 335 C
Warm sand    HEX #E8DCC8   RGB 232/220/200  CMYK 8/11/22/0
Charcoal     HEX #2B2B2B   RGB 43/43/43     CMYK 0/0/0/85

TYPE
Headings — Playfair Display, Bold
Body     — Source Sans Pro, Regular / Semibold
Licenses — both Google Fonts, OFL, commercial use permitted
Fallbacks — Georgia (headings), Arial (body)

Plain text, because every person and every tool can read it, and because someone will need to paste a hex code into a form on their phone.

Include the actual font files in the folder where the license allows redistribution, and record the license either way. Fonts that live only in a design subscription vanish when the subscription does, and a contractor without that subscription can't match your materials.

Photography with usage terms attached

03 Photography/
  Team/
  Product/
  Location/
  Stock/
  LICENSES.md

LICENSES.md records where each set came from and what you're allowed to do with it:

Team headshots — [photographer], shot 2024-06, full commercial rights,
  invoice in 02 Finance/2024, model releases in 01 Admin/Legal
Product photos — in-house, unrestricted
Stock set A — [source], standard license, NOT for merchandise or resale

The distinctions in stock licenses — editorial versus commercial, standard versus extended, print run limits — are exactly the kind of thing that's obvious when you buy and forgotten within a year. And the photo you use on a product you sell is precisely where the wrong license becomes expensive.

Keep model releases for any recognizable person, including staff. Staff leave, and a headshot on a website of someone who left two years ago is a conversation you'd rather have with paperwork in hand.

The handoff pack

_HANDOFF PACK is a single zip you send to any outside party — a printer, a conference organizer, a partner, a new contractor — without curating anything.

Inside:

Logo in the four core variants, screen and print formats
The brand values text file
Font files (or a note on where to get them)
The one-page usage guide
A README with your contact for brand questions

Build it once, update it when the brand changes, and never assemble a custom pack by hand again. The reason this matters is that ad hoc handoffs are where wrong files escape — you're in a hurry, you grab the logo from your desktop, and it turns out to be the 2019 one at 400 pixels wide.

Campaign and content assets, kept separate

Brand files are permanent. Campaign files are temporary and enormous. Keep them apart:

05 Marketing/
  Brand/          ← permanent, small, protected
  Campaigns/
    2025-04 Spring launch/
  Social/
  Website/

The practical reason: your brand folder should be small enough to back up separately and hand over easily. A brand folder that's grown to 60GB because three years of campaign exports live in it is one nobody can send anywhere.

Archive finished campaigns by date at the end of each year, keeping only the finals and the source files for anything you'd genuinely reuse.

Next in this series: How to Build a Content Calendar and Asset Library