
Show HN: Free Company Logo API - maccman
http://blog.clearbit.com/logo
======
lowglow
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!

~~~
Hovertruck
Not quite free, but this does exist at a pretty low price point:
[https://www.tailorbrands.com/](https://www.tailorbrands.com/)

~~~
aylons
Very interesting indeed. Is there any portfolio, even for fake brands, so I
can see the range of styles their logos may have?

~~~
nategraves
Hey there. I work for Tailor. We don't have currently have a portfolio, but we
are working on something akin to this. For anyone interested, you can email me
at nate@tailorbrands.com, and I'll send a coupon code your way so you can give
it a try.

------
ARolek
Killer work Alex! It'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).

The product is still in alpha, but it's amazing how many similarities we came
to with the URL scheme design. For example, image embedding:

[https://img.ogol.io/<domain.com>](https://img.ogol.io/<domain.com>) example:
[https://img.ogol.io/ogol.io](https://img.ogol.io/ogol.io)

we also support downloading

[https://dl.ogol.io/<domain.com>](https://dl.ogol.io/<domain.com>) example:
[https://dl.ogol.io/ogol.io](https://dl.ogol.io/ogol.io)

Each logo also has it's own page to make working with the asset outside of an
API easy.

[https://ogol.io/ogol.io/nn0ymd](https://ogol.io/ogol.io/nn0ymd)

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's great to see
the problem being attacked from a few different angles.

~~~
oefrha
I'm curious about the claim "pixel perfect every time" seen on your home page.
Do you employ some special algorithm to scale images, or do you just use the
standard tools? As far as I know, scaling vector graphics isn't enough to
guarantee pixel perfection (especially not at low resolutions), and low-res
logos are usually hand-crafted by designers. Maybe you should also allow
companies to upload raster logos?

------
smprk
Instead of relying on FB, Twitter, Company's site for the logo, wouldn't it be
better to create a "Company Logo Service" with an API, with the below features
-

0\. Change at one place, make it work everywhere. (consistent branding across
the wild web).

1\. Upload your company logo here with us.

2\. Multiple versions.

3\. Multiple sizes.

4\. Control and Connect various sizes, versions with your various social
accounts, newsletters, anything.

5\. IFTTT support.

6\. Get it printed on swag and merchandise.

7\. More...?

~~~
allendoerfer
Seems like a good way to waste money on a service that will very seldom
provide value (logo redesigns) and will not work across all platforms thereby
introducing an additional thing you have to worry about instead of solving it.

Better idea:

1\. Take sheet of paper

2\. Write down where you use your logo

~~~
smprk
Biggest fan of working on paper, to the extent of carrying a clipboard in my
laptop bag all the time. Along with other gadgets.

I wouldn't pay for something like that either. I was suggesting it be offered
for free, like gravtaar.

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

~~~
morgante
In what way?

Nothing about this API requires handing over more than the bare minimum of
information (which domains you want logos for). How could they be expected to
implement it without that information?

~~~
chias
There's also the referrer header that gets sent out, which includes the URL of
the page that is embedding the image. Not really "all data on your visitors"
but depending on how you use it, may leak sensitive information if you're
unwise enough to put it in the page urls (depressingly common), or allow them
to track every visit throughout your site (on pages that embed the image)

~~~
morgante
There's no reason you have to directly embed the images.

If you want to preserve user privacy, you should definitely proxy this API.

------
larrybud
Had to do it:
[https://logo.clearbit.com/piedpiper.com](https://logo.clearbit.com/piedpiper.com)

~~~
okonomiyaki3000
It's outdated. They need a version or date parameter.

------
maceo
This has been done before (and posted to HN), and it had the same problem. Way
too many false positives, especially with older sites.

[https://logo.clearbit.com/starfoods.com](https://logo.clearbit.com/starfoods.com)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
This isn't trying to scrape the page and find something vaguely logo-like.
Rather, it seems to be using iOS, OpenGraph and Twitter icons. In this case,
the site has a strange OpenGraph image specified in its meta tags. If it
produces a weird image it's because the site owner has specified an image
which isn't their logo. It's not because the API picked a random image.

For this service, if it can find an image, it's at least an image the site
owner wanted to be used to represent it.

~~~
todd3834
I wouldn't have thought that the open graph image is a logo. Seems like that
wouldn't be a reliable source for logos

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Fair point. It's at least something they've chosen to represent themselves,
however.

------
rcavezza
Hey Alex,

This is pretty sweet. Nice job! Is there a post where you talk about the tech
behind this API? I'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.

~~~
chinathrow
Fetch the domain at /, look for favicon/apple-touch-icon/OpenGraph image,
fetch the image, store and serve.

~~~
mikepurvis
Looks like it has twitter as a secondary source, eg.

[https://logo.clearbit.com/spacex.com](https://logo.clearbit.com/spacex.com)
[https://twitter.com/spacex](https://twitter.com/spacex)

Maybe other fallbacks, too?

~~~
lips
Also seems like some fairly primitive analysis would identify this as a
suspect item, at least enough to be shunted off to some sort of triage. Logos,
by and large, will have distinctly different data than images.

That, and it also doesn't match their favicon.

------
alttab
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/logo potentially without their consent. If they don't like the results,
they could sue you.

Or at least, I feel that would be the case.

~~~
Judson
I tested a few examples, and it looks to just be parsing the page and
returning the apple-touch-icon.

~~~
nandhp
That doesn't explain where
[https://logo.clearbit.com/debian.org](https://logo.clearbit.com/debian.org)
comes from....

~~~
chinathrow
[https://www.debian.org/favicon.ico](https://www.debian.org/favicon.ico) can't
be the source.

~~~
AUmrysh
It looks like that's the Debian icon on Twitter.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
[https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1311499343/debian-
squar...](https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1311499343/debian-square.png)

Looks like it.

------
chejazi
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's destination URL into
the scraped content.

------
sordidfellow
Yet another (hilarious?) false match:
[https://logo.clearbit.com/exxon.com](https://logo.clearbit.com/exxon.com)

~~~
MichaelGG
That's because Exxon specified that image. Check the HTML on exxon.com:

    
    
      <meta property="og:image" content="http://www.exxon.com/assets/imgs/en-us/energy-live-here-facebook.jpg">

~~~
imissmyjuno
That doesn't change the fact that it's a false positive…

------
sanbor
I'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's the "standard"
way to put a logo in the webpage. Some people uses just an IMG tag, other uses
an H1 with an image replacement technique.

~~~
Judson
Looks like they're just returning the apple-touch-icon if it's available.

~~~
psychometry
In my case they're returning an old version of the icon.

~~~
chinathrow
Same here. Any way to trigger a refresh?

------
thesimon
Worked on something similar on a local open data hackathon before, but instead
I used a scraper to parse the logos.

[https://github.com/c0dr/LogoParser](https://github.com/c0dr/LogoParser)

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.

[https://github.com/tomsrocket/image-
classification](https://github.com/tomsrocket/image-classification)

But yeah, using Twitter as a source might also be a good idea.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Pretty cool! I think the API docs could possibly be a bit more precise,
though. Perhaps something like this:

    
    
      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 	"png"	 	string	File format, either "png" or "jpg"
      greyscale 	(not passed) 	boolean	If this parameter is passed, image will be desaturated

~~~
maccman
Good idea - we'll make this change.

------
jakerockland
Thinking perhaps we have something set up odd in our HTML that's tripping up
the API, but a bit confused why this seems to be returning nothing
[https://logo.clearbit.com/korkapp.com](https://logo.clearbit.com/korkapp.com)

Any thoughts anyone?

------
dempseye
This is an excellent piece of marketing.

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

~~~
ereckers
I'd like to see that open sourced. A lot of the projects I'm involved in could
use it.

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

------
geofft
This vaguely reminds me of Picons, which was the '90s solution to this problem
(Gravatar for domains, but also for newsgroups and people):

[http://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/faces/picons/](http://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/faces/picons/)

If you've ever noticed the little logos on Gmane posts, they come from Picons
and favicons.

------
jstsch
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?

[https://logo.clearbit.com/h5mag.com](https://logo.clearbit.com/h5mag.com)
from... <img class="logo" src="/img/h5mag-logo.svg" alt="logo H5mag">

------
prawn
If you're using Twitter as a source for company logos, you might be serving a
lot of rainbow icons this week!

------
k4rtik
Late to the party, but this looks interesting.

Google does something similar for extracting favicons for any domain, such as
[https://plus.google.com/_/favicon?domain=github.com](https://plus.google.com/_/favicon?domain=github.com)

------
mukgupta
I noticed that you are returning the company name in the title.
[https://logo.clearbit.com/fb.com](https://logo.clearbit.com/fb.com) .Is that
intentional? Asking this because you provide a Company API too which is paid.

~~~
captn3m0
This API call is just returning a PNG image with almost no EXIF data. In that
case, the title is set by browsers to the filename, which is equal to the
domain name itself. Are you seeing something else in the title? (I see fb.com)

~~~
mukgupta
Saw this in response headers.

Content-Disposition:"inline; filename="Facebook.png""

I am using firefox which apparently uses this header to set the title. Chrome
OTOH won't do it

~~~
captn3m0
Interesting. I did look at headers, but missed the Content-Disposition for
some reason.

------
imaginenore
You need a better upscaling algorithm.

[https://logo.clearbit.com/alexa.com?size=512](https://logo.clearbit.com/alexa.com?size=512)

Ideally all your logos should be in vector and rendered to any size (or at
least powers of 2 for easier caching).

------
Goliney
Maccman, Logaster offers own API which will generate logos. If you interested
read more here [https://www.logaster.com/about-
logaster/api/](https://www.logaster.com/about-logaster/api/)

------
cstrasen
Hi. Nice idea. Images seem to be scaled not optimally though in same cases
seeing jagged edges like here:
[https://logo.clearbit.com/medigo.com](https://logo.clearbit.com/medigo.com)

------
prawn
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/apps doing it are pretty ugly or largely text based.

------
apendleton
Are there terms of service associated with this API? I can't seem to find any.

------
lightyrs
Great API, thank you!

I made a little hubot script for this: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/hubot-
logo](https://www.npmjs.com/package/hubot-logo)

Use it like this: hubot logo stripe.com

------
yzh
[https://logo.clearbit.com/armadilloaerospace.com](https://logo.clearbit.com/armadilloaerospace.com)
Where is the armadillo? I want my armadillo.

------
markrages
[https://logo.clearbit.com/news.ycombinator.com](https://logo.clearbit.com/news.ycombinator.com)

~~~
fizx
Doesn't work, though
[https://logo.clearbit.com/ycombinator.com](https://logo.clearbit.com/ycombinator.com)
does.

------
Vexs
That's pretty dang cool. Might cause issues if clearbit ever looses the data
and a bunch of websites link to it, but that's pretty standard.

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

------
zatkin
Doesn't work for my domain: zk.gd

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

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

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

------
jtwebman
Isn't that what the favicon.ico in the root of your site for?

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

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

~~~
chinathrow
How so?

------
malcolmocean
uhh...
[https://logo.clearbit.com/amazon.com](https://logo.clearbit.com/amazon.com)

------
c3d
Internal error for
[https://logo.clearbit.com/taodyne](https://logo.clearbit.com/taodyne) :-( We
recently chàged server, that might be why.

~~~
finnn
Seems to work fine if you put in a domain instead of just a name:

[https://logo.clearbit.com/taodyne.com](https://logo.clearbit.com/taodyne.com)

------
cmdrfred
This is great I will have to remember it.

------
gorm
Great work! Very useful :)

------
thetylerhayes
Nice, seems super helpful.

------
MikeTLive
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.

------
dribel
great!!!! really really great!

------
huntermeyer
Awesome! Have wanted this for so long!

------
dperalta
Brilliant!

------
treve
Well done!

------
culo
Just curious.. what do you guys use for API management to handle
authentications, logging, rate-limiting, etc..

1\. Open-source solutions like KONG
([https://github.com/mashape/kong](https://github.com/mashape/kong)) or
similar?

2\. Built in house?

3\. Commercial services such as Apigee, Mashery?

------
SeanLuke
Surely there's a trademark protection concern here.

~~~
SolarNet
Nope, trademarks are used to distinguish brands and ensure their authenticity,
and that's exactly what is happening here. If people used this to impersonate
another company (e.g. to pretend they had gotten their endorsement) then
that's a problem. But as long as this is used as part of a directory (or
similar) service there is no copyright or trademark problem.

------
eonw
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?

------
markbnj
Great idea, but something tells me the companies whose logos are available
won'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.

~~~
drivingmenuts
I would argue opt-in for having your logo with the service, rather than opt-
out, but it might be difficult to come up with a benefit that's enticing
enough.

There's maybe some value in the logo owner being able to get information on
who's using their logo (service not yet provided).

From the logo-consumer standpoint, it's pretty cool, though, it would be
difficult to know if the logo is current enough.

------
vmarsy
Be careful with copyright issues. How do you make it work? Do you scrape them
automatically or gather them from the brands marketing materials?

I tried different logos, and I find a few issues:

[https://logo.clearbit.com/mcdonalds.com?size=256](https://logo.clearbit.com/mcdonalds.com?size=256)

Mcdonalds US logo background should be red
([http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/newsroom/image_and_video_l...](http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/newsroom/image_and_video_library/logos.html)
)

[https://logo.clearbit.com/bk.com?size=256](https://logo.clearbit.com/bk.com?size=256)

The quality of that one is bad. Wikipedia's one is a .svg :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Burger_King_Logo.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Burger_King_Logo.svg)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I don't think they'll have copyright issues, it'd probably be considered fair
use.

As for the McDonalds logo, I suspect the turquoise is because that's the
current background colour of mcdonalds.com

~~~
mikepurvis
Or because it's from here:
[https://twitter.com/mcdonalds](https://twitter.com/mcdonalds)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Ah, that makes more sense. It was mentioned below that it seems to be using
Twitter.

