lucide/BRAND_LOGOS_STATEMENT.md

# Brand Logos Statement

Our official stance on including brand logos in Lucide

## TL;DR

Lucide **does not accept** brand logos, and we do not plan to add them in the future.

This is due to a combination of **legal restrictions**, **design consistency concerns**, and **practical maintenance reasons**.

If you need brand logos, we recommend [Simple Icons](https://simpleicons.org/), which provides an extensive, legally safer collection of brand marks.

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## 1. Historical Context

This is not a new debate — other icon sets have gone through the same discussion:

- **Material Design Icons** [deprecated all brand icons](https://github.com/Templarian/MaterialDesign/issues/6602) because they didn't fit the style, didn't work well in one color, and often looked out of place in a 24×24px grid.
- **Feather Icons** [came to the same conclusion](https://github.com/feathericons/feather/issues/763): brand logos have their own style, and forcing them into another inevitably leads to aesthetic compromises.
- **Lucide** learned from these examples — we'd rather focus on making a consistent set of non-brand icons that all work together.

## 2. Legal Considerations

Most brand logos:
- Are **protected by trademark or copyright**.
- Have **strict rules** for how they can be used (colors, spacing, proportions, etc.).
- **Don't allow modification** — but we'd have to change them to fit Lucide's style.

This means adding them could:
1. Break copyright or trademark law.
2. Make both you and the Lucide project legally responsible.
3. Force us to review every new request one by one for legal issues — something we simply can't do.

> **Note:** Simple Icons avoids this by keeping logos exactly as the brand provides them — though even they sometimes face [legal challenges](https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/issues/11236).

## 3. Design & Consistency

Lucide is all about **visual consistency**.

Adding brand logos would:
- Break [our own design rules](https://lucide.dev/contribute/icon-design-guide#icon-design-principles) for shapes, proportions, and stroke.
- Mix two fundamentally different categories of graphics (pictograms vs. corporate logos).
- Create a library where a subset of icons will always look "out of place".

If the logos are not in Lucide's style, why include them in Lucide at all? Better to use them from a dedicated brand icon source.

## 4. Maintenance Burden

Even with our current **"no brand icon requests"** policy, people still request them regularly.

Having any brand icons in the set:
- Makes people think we might add more in the future.
- Leads to repeated requests and the same conversations over and over.
- Wastes maintainer time redirecting people to the same explanation.

Removing them entirely solves this problem.

## 5. Recommended Alternatives

If you need brand icons, try:
- [Simple Icons](https://simpleicons.org/): offers a huge range of brands, in consistent SVG format, using a 24×24 viewBox, the same as ours.
- Official brand asset pages: most major companies provide downloadable SVGs.

You can use these alongside Lucide without bloating our core library.

## Final Words

Lucide is an **icon** set, not a **logo** set.

Logos belong in dedicated logo resources.

We're focusing on what Lucide does best: providing a clean, cohesive, and legally safe collection of open-source icons.