The reason I would argue for outlines is simple, and it’s the same reason designers should expand their strokes, and pretty much just outline anything in a logo. When you’re creating a logo, and you have it finalized, you’re producing a single version. This means that should you give the design to someone else to use, you’re not giving it to them as a suggestion of how it should look, you’re giving it to them as how it should look. No differences, nothing… it’s just exactly as you want it.

With that being said, consider that you didn’t convert your logo type to outlines, or convert your strokes to paths. What could potentially happen is when another designer or agency touches that logo, the likelihood of them changing something, even if on accident, goes up exponentially. Let’s say your type was an OpenType version of Cronos Pro, and you didn’t outline it, and when someone else opens it up and substitutes a TrueType version of Cronos Pro because they think they’re the same, a litany of problems could arise, some of which include:

• The kerning becomes off.
• the x-height of the font is altered.
• The entire look of the type could change if the wrong font entirely is used.
  
  

So for that reason alone, type in logos should always be converted to outlines. Not to mention that when the type is outlined, you’re able to manipulate the points, and make it unique to your design. If you’re a professional designer, you should never just be typing out a font and leaving it completely as-is in a logo. Simple, slight modifications to the widths of strokes, or the height of serifs can give your logos way more personality. Sure, there may be times when leaving it alone would suffice, but those moments are the anomalies.

As for strokes, the same problems come up. If the size of your logo is altered, and whoever altered it didn’t have the adjustment set to proportional, your lines are going to thin out, or thicken up. Needless to say, if you spent hours tweaking everything in your logo to be “just so” then not going the extra step to safeguard that it will always be reproduced right is downright lazy.

It should be noted that this argument is for finalized logos. You should always keep a version with live type in case you ever need to know what the typeface was and have since forgotten, or if you need it to reference later. The easiest way to ensure you do this is to just save your final art, then convert everything and save it as a different file name identifying it as outlines.