If you are in the finance business, you will probably be thinking ‘Earnings per share isn’t it?’. You would be factually correct, but that’s not what we mean when we ask for one. So what is an EPS then?
In the world of design, an EPS is a filetype. It stands for ‘Encapsulated PostScript’. This means that it is a PostScript type file, that is fully self-contained with everything it needs to view in any program that supports it. (Some files such as font files are not fully self-contained, so you will see something different from the original if you do not have the font for example.)
If you want the nitty gritty, you can look it up on Wikipedia or similar. Here I will explain why we ask for them.
There are different ways of the computer encoding images. The most common used is a JPEG. This stores the data in bytes of information about the pixels. It is a pixel based filetype. This means when you try to make the image bigger, it can only enlarge each little square, and somewhere down the line you end up with an image made of boxes and jagged edges. Not to mention a jpeg has a background colour, which leaves a box behind your logo. An EPS is vector based, so it is brilliant for logos, and it comes without a background, so we can put it on whatever colour we need! The image above shows the difference between a JPEG and an EPS when we try to resize them. (Because this is on the web it has to be a jpeg to publish, so you can see there is still some loss of clarity, but you get the picture.)
Vector images are stored as information about coordinates and colours, so for example an image of a thin black horizontal line will be stored as ‘black square-blank square-black square’ by a JPEG, but ‘0,0 to 1,0, black, 1pixel thick’ by an EPS. If you resize this, there is no loss of image quality. So that logo you gave us will be the same quality as a thumbnail, as it would be plastered on the side of a building.
We love EPS’s, because we can resize them to our heart’s content, and use them bigger and bolder. As because it is fully encapsulated, we can get the information about the colours out of it too. A PDF of the vector file is also good, as it works in the same way. But if you save a JPEG as a PDF, the PDF can only remember the original pixels. It cannot create the coordinates itself.
So remember, for photos it should be a JPEG, but for your beautiful company logo to remain beautiful, please can we have an EPS?