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Create Transparent Logos with GIMP

transparent logos gimp

This post was originally published on The Data School blog between 2018 and July 2025, before our program was renamed to MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. References throughout this article to “The Data School” or “DS” all refer to what is now MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. The program, its people, and its commitment to launching outstanding analytics careers remain the same – just under a new name.

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I have been developing my tableau resume for the last couple of days. I used custom shapes on this cv which are usually stored in the repository, in the following folder on your PC: C:UsersYOURNAMEDocumentsMy Tableau RepositoryShapes. The resume contains three sections where you find the customs shape shapes: CONTACT ME, CERTIFICATES and PUBLICATIONS. We will focus on the CONTACT ME section and the LinkedIn Shape for simplicity. You can find different logos on the Internet. However, to apply different colours to your symbols in Tableau, you need to have a transparent background. Even though when you search specifically for transparent background on Google, it looks transparent, but it is not. The only logo with the transparent background out of these five was the Tableau symbol. So, having transparent background allows you to colour shapes in Tableau but not the entire picture like shown below:

You can see that the LinkedIn, blog, Twitter and email logos are fully coloured in oppose to the Tableau logo. To fix this problem you need to make a transparent background. One can find different ways of doing so and the way I found is pretty easy and straightforward is by using free and open-source software called Gimp. The latest version can be downloaded here. So, in this article, I will show you how using a few easy steps you can create a transparent background.

CREATING TRANSPARENT BACKGROUND

  1. Download and install Gimp.
  2. Open a logo in Gimp you want to have a transparent background. You can simply drag and drop it:
  3. You need to add alpha channel: Layer -> Transparency -> Add alpha channel:
  4. You should get the second layer which you can find on the right-hand side of your window:
  5. After that, you have to select the LinkedIn logo. You can just press a tool Select by colour or simply use SHIFT+O. By choosing the colour you want to choose, for instance, black like in our case you select the logo.
  6. Then, you want to invert the selection to choose the background. Just go to Select -> Invert:
  7. Now you are ready to remove the background by going to Edit -> Clear and you will end up having the following picture with the transparent background:
  8. To save your results go to File -> Export As. At the opened window choose the destination where you want to save the new file. You may want to save it directly to the repository. Choose png format if needed by Select File Type (By Extension) at the bottom of the window. Then press export and you will find a new window where you have to select also “Save colour values from transparent pixels.
  9. After all, you can use this logo as a shape in Tableau and apply different colours to it.

TO SUM UP

We walked through a simple approach of transforming a logo with a background to a transparent background with a free software Gimp. This logo can be used in Tableau as a shape and different colours can be applied to it. I believe Gimp be useful for other problems in your daily routine.

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