SVG Tiny P/S Conversion and Why VMC Logos Get Rejected

There are two different reasons your logo gets rejected

A Verified Mark Certificate application fails in one of two places, and they have nothing to do with each other.

The first is the file. Your SVG has to conform to SVG Tiny 1.2 Portable/Secure, usually written SVG Tiny P/S. This is a deliberately restricted profile with a short list of allowed elements and a mandatory declaration on the root element. A normal SVG exported from Illustrator or Figma will not pass. It is not close.

The second is the trademark. The certificate authority has to confirm that the artwork you submitted matches the mark as it appears in the trademark office database. A technically perfect file that does not match your registration gets rejected, and no conversion tool can fix that.

Fixing one does nothing for the other. It is easy to keep fixing the file over and over when the actual problem is the registration.

What SVG Tiny P/S actually is

SVG Tiny 1.2 is a W3C profile built for constrained renderers. Portable/Secure is a further restriction on top of it, published by the AuthIndicators Working Group, the same group that maintains the Mark Certificate Requirements.

The Mark Certificate Requirements name the governing document by exact version. They point to the draft-svg-tiny-ps-abrotman guidelines hosted at bimigroup.org/resources/RFC_SVG_PS.txt, and to a RELAX NG Compact schema at bimigroup.org/resources/SVG_PS-latest.rnc.txt.

That schema matters. Your file is checked against a formal grammar, not eyeballed. "It opens fine in Chrome" tells you nothing. Chrome renders almost anything.

The profile exists because mailbox providers render your logo inside their interface. Anything that can fetch a remote resource, run code, or animate is stripped out at the profile level.

The root element, exactly

Three attributes are mandatory on the root svg element. SSL.com calls a wrong baseProfile the most frequent technical error. Illustrator does write one when you export SVG Tiny 1.2, but it writes baseProfile="tiny", and the profile requires baseProfile="tiny-ps". You have to change the value by hand.

• xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
• version="1.2"
• baseProfile="tiny-ps"
• A title element that is present, non-empty, and appears exactly once as a child of svg. Put your brand name in it and keep it to 64 characters or fewer.
• No x or y attribute on the root svg element. Illustrator writes x="0px" y="0px" by default and it fails validation.

What has to come out of a normal SVG

The profile disallows entire sections of the SVG specification: multimedia, interactivity, linking, scripting, and animation. It also specifically excludes the image and switch elements.

In practice that means deleting script, a, image, animate, animateTransform, foreignObject, switch, and every filter effect. Drop shadows, blurs, and glows are filters. There is no workaround. You cannot rasterize a filter to a PNG and embed it, because embedded raster images are banned by the same rule.

All six of these attributes behave the same way. focusable, snapshotTime, playbackOrder, timelineBegin, zoomAndPan and externalResourcesRequired should not be present, and if one is present it must carry a single fixed value: focusable="false", snapshotTime="none", playbackOrder="all", timelineBegin="onLoad", zoomAndPan="disable", externalResourcesRequired="false". The RELAX NG schema permits exactly those values, and the example document in the guidelines carries zoomAndPan="disable" and externalResourcesRequired="false" itself. Deleting all six is simpler.

External references of any kind are out. No linked stylesheets, no remote fonts, no CSS classes pointing at a stylesheet you did not embed. Use inline presentation attributes.

• Permitted elements: path, rect, circle, ellipse, line, polyline, polygon, text, textArea, g, defs, use, linearGradient, radialGradient, solidColor, title, desc, metadata
• Gradients are allowed, but only linear and radial. Mesh gradients and gradient meshes from Illustrator will not survive export.
• The text element is permitted, which surprises people. Convert your type to outlines anyway. You cannot rely on the renderer having your font, and a substituted font is a mark that no longer matches your registration.

Square canvas, solid background, two colors

Use a square viewBox with a 1:1 ratio. Something like viewBox="0 0 512 512" is fine. The exact numbers do not matter, the ratio does.

Give the logo a solid, opaque background. Draw a rect that covers the full viewBox and fill it. The profile itself does not forbid transparency, but the certificate authorities require an opaque background and transparent files render unpredictably across clients. This is a real rejection reason, not a style preference.

Clients crop the logo, and the shape varies. The BIMI Group says it may be displayed as a circle, or as a square with rounded corners, depending on the implementation. Assume your corners can be cut. Centre the artwork and leave padding so nothing important sits near an edge. A wide horizontal lockup squeezed into a square will look wrong in the inbox even if it passes validation.

One more rule that catches people out: an SVG Tiny P/S document must render at least two colors. A single-color mark on a background of that same color fails.

File size, line endings, and encoding

The guidelines say the file should be as small as possible and should not exceed 32 kilobytes, measured uncompressed. Aim well under that.

If you go over, the BIMI Group validator returns this: SVG_FETCH_ERROR: Could not fetch SVG (Size of response body exceeds the maximum allowed of 65535). The two numbers are different because they measure different things. Treat 32 KB as your ceiling.

To get under it: simplify paths, reduce anchor points, drop editor metadata, and run the file through SVGO. A traced logo with thousands of nodes can push you over on its own.

Line endings must be LF only. Not CRLF. Adobe Illustrator on Windows writes CRLF, which is why both DigiCert and GlobalSign publish a dedicated support article about converting CR-LF to LF. In Notepad++ that is Edit, then EOL Conversion, then Unix (LF). Save as UTF-8.

A conversion path that works

The order matters. Doing the hand-editing before the export means redoing it.

• 1. Start from real vector source. An .ai, .eps, or the drawing filed with your trademark. If all you have is a PNG, you are redrawing the logo, not converting it, and a trace will blow past 32 KB.
• 2. Square the artboard, centre the mark, and add padding for the circular crop.
• 3. Add a solid background rect covering the whole viewBox.
• 4. Convert all text to outlines.
• 5. Expand or delete every effect. Shadows, blurs, glows, and transparency groups all have to go.
• 6. Export using Illustrator's SVG Tiny 1.2 option. This gets you most of the way and no further.
• 7. Hand-edit the file. Delete x, y and overflow from the root svg, change baseProfile from "tiny" to "tiny-ps", add the title element, and strip editor metadata.
• 8. Convert line endings to LF and save as UTF-8.
• 9. Validate, then host over HTTPS. HTTPS is the only supported transport in the BIMI record.

Validate before you submit

Validate more than once, with more than one tool. They disagree.

The BIMI Group publishes an SVG Assistant tool that validates and normalises pasted SVG. It is explicitly labelled beta and does not always work. The RELAX NG schema is the closest thing to ground truth. There is also an open-source command line converter, svgtinyps-cli, which sets the title for you. GlobalSign runs a BIMI SVG auto-correct tool inside its certificate centre that fixes common upload errors.

The only opinion that counts is your certificate authority's. Run their tool before you submit anything.

Why a logo is rejected for not matching the registered mark

This is the half no converter touches. The requirement is that the certificate authority confirms your submitted artwork matches the registered mark as it appears in the official trademark office database, or in the WIPO Global Brand Database. The CA has to record its decision and its reasons.

Here is the part almost nobody tells you. There is no published matching rulebook. Appendix E of the Mark Certificate Requirements is the section reserved for matching rules, and in version 1.8, dated 11 June 2026, its entire content is a heading and the sentence that it is still being drafted. Matching is CA judgment, case by case. If someone quotes you a precise tolerance for how far your logo can drift, they invented it.

What is written down is narrow and specific:

• Word marks may be reformatted. A single registered word may be split into stacked parts. Multiple registered words may be split, stacked, or combined into one word. That is the whole list of permitted changes for a VMC.
• Color is restricted. For Combined Marks and Design Marks, the representation may only use colors permitted for that registration by that office. A black and white registration does not automatically license your brand palette, and the CA has to examine what rights you actually hold.
• Ownership must line up. The registration has to be held by your organisation, or a parent, subsidiary, or affiliate. If it sits with a holding company, a founder personally, or a former agency, the CA cannot issue without an authorisation letter from the owner of record.
• The registration must be in good standing. Pending applications are not eligible. Only registered marks qualify for the logotype under the registered mark profile.
• Your business needs verifiable operational existence, typically three years on record with an incorporating or registration agency, or a listing in a qualified information or tax source, or an active deposit account with a regulated financial institution.

If your logo does not match, there are written escape hatches

Most brands have rebranded since they filed. That is normal, and there are two documented routes that do not require a new trademark filing.

A Modified Registered Trademark Certificate is a type of Common Mark Certificate built for exactly this. Its rules are written down and considerably more generous than the VMC rules. For Combined Marks you may rearrange word elements relative to the design elements. For Design and Combined Marks you may remove part of the design element, provided you remove no more than 49 percent of it and do not alter what remains. Modified marks may be shown in any font or color against a colored or patterned background. The CA may ask you to indemnify it in exchange.

Proof of prior use is the other route, and it needs no trademark at all. The CA verifies that the logo is currently displayed on a website whose domain you control, and that it was displayed on that same domain at least 12 months before the verification date. The historical check runs against an approved archive source, and right now archive.org is the only one on that list. If the Wayback Machine has no capture of your logo from a year ago on your domain, this route is closed to you today. That is a five minute check you should do before paying anyone.

The trade-off is real. A CMC gets your logo into the inbox. The blue checkmark in Gmail is tied to the VMC and its registered mark profile.

When we tell people not to buy

We would rather decline than take a fee for something we do not think will land. Situations where we will say no, or say wait:

A trademark application that is still pending. There is no expedited path and the CA cannot make an exception. Wait for registration, or go the CMC route in the meantime.

No vector source anywhere in the business. If the only file left is a low resolution PNG, the first job is a redraw, and a redraw introduces drift from the registered mark. That is a design project before it is a certificate project.

A black and white registration attached to a brand where the color is the whole point. You may be entitled to less than you assume, and it is better to know that before you spend.

DMARC not at enforcement, with a mail stream nobody has audited. Rushing to p=reject to unlock a logo is how legitimate mail starts disappearing. Fix authentication properly first. The logo is the reward, not the reason.

Working with us

We ran this whole stack on our own business before we sold it to anyone. Bench Clearers, our hockey apparel store, has a GlobalSign VMC, BIMI live in Gmail, and a Meta Verified Instagram account. We hit the CRLF problem, the missing baseProfile, and the color question ourselves. We work only through official channels, we never ask for your passwords, ID documents, or card numbers, and we will tell you plainly when we think an application will not succeed. If you want someone to look at your mark and your file before you spend money on a certificate, that conversation is free.