Why does my SVG lose its colours?

Open an Illustrator export in a text editor and the paths usually carry no fill at all. They carry a class name:

<defs>
  <style>.cls-1{fill:#fff22d;}.cls-2{fill:#cc2229;}</style>
</defs>
<path class="cls-1" d="M2.8 71.3l2.2 19.4…"/>

Every colour in that logo lives in one line of CSS, in a place most people never look. The path itself says nothing about being yellow.

An SVG can carry scripts, external images, and references that fetch from other servers, and almost all of that sits inside <defs>. Removing the whole element is the fast way to make an uploaded file safe to render. It is also how the palette disappears.

The symptom is distinctive: the shapes are all correct, the proportions are right, and everything is one flat colour. Nothing is missing except the thing that said what colour to be.

If you control the export, the reliable move is to make the colours travel on the shapes themselves. In Illustrator, in the SVG export dialog, set Styling to "Presentation Attributes" instead of "Internal CSS". Every path then carries its own fill="#fff22d" and no stylesheet is needed.

In CorelDRAW the same setting lives under the SVG export options as "Styling", with the same two choices and the same consequence.

The safe version of stripping <defs> is to read the stylesheet first. Move the <style> element out of <defs>, drop @import rules and any url() that points at another server, then remove the rest. The browser resolves the classes, getComputedStyle reports the real fill on every path, and the artwork keeps its palette.

loguitoc does exactly this on import, which is why a logo dropped in from Illustrator arrives in its own colours.