Show HN: Free Company Logo API

http://blog.clearbit.com/logo

by maccman • 11 years ago

525 152 11 years ago

blog.clearbit.com

dperalta• 11 years ago

Brilliant!

thetylerhayes• 11 years ago

Nice, seems super helpful.

Vexs• 11 years ago

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.

msoad• 11 years ago

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

ereckers• 11 years ago

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

alttab• 11 years ago

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.

Judson2• 11 years ago

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

nandhp• 11 years ago

That doesn't explain where https://logo.clearbit.com/debian.org comes from....

x5n1• 11 years ago

Not really modifying it. But they may have branding and licensing guidelines that a service like this might not meet which would likely result in a cease and desist rather than an immediate lawsuit.

jameshart• 11 years ago

'Fair use' only applies to the copyright implications of distributing these images; the far murkier bit of IP law that this gets into is trademark licensing. That's far more likely to be the issue here.

amolgupta• 11 years ago

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

Yadi• 11 years ago

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

chinathrow4• 11 years ago

How so?

rcavezza• 11 years ago

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.

chinathrow4• 11 years ago

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

mikepurvis2• 11 years ago

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

https://logo.clearbit.com/spacex.com https://twitter.com/spacex

Maybe other fallbacks, too?

maccman3• 11 years ago

Behind the scenes we're using Clearbit's Company API which does a lot of sleuthing: scanning the page for social accounts, meta tags etc. Then we try and return the best logo we can find.

https://clearbit.com/docs#company-api

slantyyz• 11 years ago

> I use business intelligence APIs like Clearbit and FullContact.

When I saw the tagline "Business Intelligence APIs" at the top of the posted link, I totally thought Clearbit's line of business was something completely different-- more along the lines of data warehousing, analytics and reporting.

porker• 11 years ago

I wish Clearbit had a "very early stage" plan - say 1000 requests a month, which I could use with proof of concept or little side project systems. 50 free requests isn't much: by the time you've demo'd to 5 people for feedback they'd be gone.

cmdrfred• 11 years ago

This is great I will have to remember it.

sanbor• 11 years ago

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.

Judson2• 11 years ago

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

psychometry• 11 years ago

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

vmarsy• 11 years ago

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

Mcdonalds US logo background should be red (http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/newsroom/image_and_video_l... )

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

TazeTSchnitzel6• 11 years ago

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

mikepurvis2• 11 years ago

Or because it's from here: https://twitter.com/mcdonalds

Kiro• 11 years ago

I don't see any red backgrounds in your link.

TazeTSchnitzel6• 11 years ago

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

maccman3• 11 years ago

Good idea - we'll make this change.

chejazi• 11 years ago

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.

markbnj• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

maceo• 11 years ago

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

TazeTSchnitzel6• 11 years ago

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.

VivaCascadia• 11 years ago

Yeah, really odd choice for an Open Graph image. They specify that burger and soda image directly in their header.

todd3834• 11 years ago

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

ews• 11 years ago

Another (big) false positive is craigslist: https://logo.clearbit.com/craigslist.org

jswanson• 11 years ago

Interesting results with Blizzard.com: https://logo.clearbit.com/blizzard.com?size=500

akavel• 11 years ago

or (first semi-random one I tried): https://logo.clearbit.com/sabre.com - totally absurd

iLoch• 11 years ago

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

lowglow• 11 years ago

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!

mmahemoff2• 11 years ago

The post mentions Gravatar, so actually it should do the same thing and return a generated image as a function of the domain, if no known one exists.

michaelmior• 11 years ago

It might be nice if that were an option, but having that as the default behaviour would be strange and unexpected IMO.

david-given• 11 years ago

That's exactly what I thought. I told it to generate Google's logo and was then quite surprised when it actually produced Google's logo.

alexhawdon• 11 years ago

That would be an interesting extension to develop. I agree it should be optional.

I'm envisaging scraping colours and fonts from the target domain to recreate a text-only logo.

Hovertruck2• 11 years ago

Not quite free, but this does exist at a pretty low price point: https://www.tailorbrands.com/

tjbiddle• 11 years ago

Neat! Definitely checking these guys out.

aylons• 11 years ago

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

rcraft• 11 years ago

Another great option I found recently is https://www.logaster.com/create/logo/. Free for low-res small images.

Yhippa• 11 years ago

Squarespace has a logo generator: http://www.squarespace.com/logo/. Watermarked version and low-res for free, $10 otherwise.

cerberusss• 11 years ago

That is very, very nice. For stylized artwork, you can search for keywords. I typed "apps" (I'm an iOS developer) and got a bunch of icons that gave me enough good ideas to open up Sketch and create one for my own one-man-company.

ryanSrich4• 11 years ago

I thought the same thing but as a designer I had the opposite reaction. I was prepared to be offended.

jtreminio2• 11 years ago

Why in the world would this offend you?

kriro• 11 years ago

I see two scenarios 1) If the logos themselves are as good as a real designer's work (I doubt it) great, I pick that logo. Sucks for designers but design is a much wider field than creating pretty logos.

2) If it isn't I can rapidly prototype my basic ideas and take them to a designer. This is excellent and I'd embrace this as a designer.

richmarr• 11 years ago

Fear of change is justifiable in my opinion; offense isn't.

There are parts of any expertise that are formulaic, and by using the word "parts" I'm being generous to humankind.

Should systems/ops folks be 'offended' that PaaS are becoming the default choice for new projects?

If you DO think they should be offended, then I think you're flat wrong. Being offended by commoditisation is like being angry at entropy, or enraged by gravity.

If you DON'T think they should be offended; why not? Does their job not require thought, or creativity? I'd answer that one carefully if I were you ;)

soci• 11 years ago

Not an API, but I used a website to generate a free logo for an MVP I'm building. So far so good. http://www.hipsterlogogenerator.com

thomasrossi• 11 years ago

yes, that is what I thought too! But then again, gravatar does the same thing for users. While looking at the website I've found their lead-qualification tool for salesforce. That's much more interesting.

culo• 11 years ago

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) or similar?

2. Built in house?

3. Commercial services such as Apigee, Mashery?

naankari• 11 years ago

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

treve• 11 years ago

Well done!

smprk2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

smprk2• 11 years ago

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.

manigandham• 11 years ago

Wouldn't pay money for this. Easier to just have a list of sites where we maintain profiles since we still have to manage that various bits of other information about the company, beyond just the logo (which is probably the thing that changes the least).

zachsnow• 11 years ago

Absolutely. Would pay money for this!

The question is: how much?

SeanLuke• 11 years ago

Surely there's a trademark protection concern here.

SolarNet• 11 years ago

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.

gorm• 11 years ago

Great work! Very useful :)

c3d• 11 years ago

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

cityzen• 11 years ago

https://logo.clearbit.com/taodyne.com works

finnn• 11 years ago

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

https://logo.clearbit.com/taodyne.com

Tepix• 11 years ago

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

cstrasen• 11 years ago

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

eonw• 11 years ago

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?

dribel• 11 years ago

great!!!! really really great!

huntermeyer• 11 years ago

Awesome! Have wanted this for so long!

geofft• 11 years ago

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/

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

zatkin• 11 years ago

Doesn't work for my domain: zk.gd

apendleton• 11 years ago

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

yzh• 11 years ago

https://logo.clearbit.com/armadilloaerospace.com Where is the armadillo? I want my armadillo.

repler• 11 years ago

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

shedletsky• 11 years ago

This guy knows what is up.

pbiggar• 11 years ago

I don't know what clearbit collects, but I would guess that this isn't the business model. Clearbit sells a B2B product - they monetize by charging money for a service directly, not indirectly via "collecting data about your visitors".

morgante2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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)

larrybud• 11 years ago

Had to do it: https://logo.clearbit.com/piedpiper.com

okonomiyaki3000• 11 years ago

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

sordidfellow• 11 years ago

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

MichaelGG2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

mukgupta3• 11 years ago

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

captn3m02• 11 years ago

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)

mukgupta3• 11 years ago

Strange. I see Facebook in the title

mukgupta3• 11 years ago

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

imaginenore• 11 years ago

You need a better upscaling algorithm.

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).

ARolek• 11 years ago

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> example: https://img.ogol.io/ogol.io

we also support downloading

https://dl.ogol.io/<domain.com> example: 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

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.

maccman3• 11 years ago

ogol.io is a pretty awesome idea! Love it.

oefrha2• 11 years ago

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?

markrages• 11 years ago

https://logo.clearbit.com/news.ycombinator.com

fizx• 11 years ago

Doesn't work, though https://logo.clearbit.com/ycombinator.com does.

jstsch• 11 years ago

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 from... <img class="logo" src="/img/h5mag-logo.svg" alt="logo H5mag">

prawn4• 11 years ago

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

thesimon• 11 years ago

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

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

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

jakerockland• 11 years ago

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

Any thoughts anyone?

dempseye• 11 years ago

This is an excellent piece of marketing.

maxdemarzi• 11 years ago

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

jtwebman• 11 years ago

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

MikeTLive• 11 years ago

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.

prawn4• 11 years ago

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.

lightyrs• 11 years ago

Great API, thank you!

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

Use it like this: hubot logo stripe.com

tempodox• 11 years ago

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

Goliney• 11 years ago

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

malcolmocean• 11 years ago

uhh... https://logo.clearbit.com/amazon.com

k4rtik• 11 years ago

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

Show HN: Free Company Logo API

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