The Logo Factor Design Blog » illustrator

Bitmap to Vector conversion. Online Vector Tracing

Steve Douglas — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 14:31:21 +0000

Any logo designer worth their salt knows that vector formats are the only way to go when it comes to logo design. The vector-capability boundaries between Illustrator and Photoshop have blurred a little over the years (yes, you can create vector based in images, but it’s still a little hinky). Years ago, when it came to quick and dirty (often very dirty) vector conversion, we used a handy little utility called Streamline at the shop. Put out by Adobe, most of Streamline’s vector conversion properties were bundled into Illustrator CS and renamed Live Trace.

Auto-tracing. A little hit & miss.

Never been much of a fan of ‘auto-trace’ solutions for anything – they tend to create ‘choppy’ graphics, are a little control point happy, and leave a lot to be desired when it comes to overlaying one vector object over another. Most auto-conversion programs tend to leave little ‘gaps’ between the objects (attempting to butt shapes together like a jig-saw puzzle, rather than overlaying one on top of another as a series of layers). At the end of the day, I’ve always felt that manual hand-tracing is always the way to go (see our logo repair section for more), especially when you want smooth curves and what have you. Auto-tracing an image, then hand-editing it to acceptable standards often takes MORE time that hand-tracing from scratch.

Converting photographs to vector formats.

But what if you want a quick-and-dirty solution and want to quickly crank out a vector version for a comp, or you’re after a posterization effect where choppiness and rough edges are the desired result? I’ve been tinkering around with an online vector tracing site, Vector Magic (screen grab above), that allows you to upload jpgs, pngs, bitmaps and just about any other image file and quickly convert it to various vector formats. At first I was a little skeptical, but the results are as good as ANY desktop application, and in some cases even better. My first test involved a photograph of some toothy-grinned kid (relax, it’s me) that I was playing around with for a personal Twitter avatar. Not a terribly big image size (it was carved out of a photo booth picture of me and my father, when was I was a buck-toothed kid in Ireland). I let Vector Magic do it’s thing and ended up with the result below:

Aieee, that’s big! Anyhoo, not bad. Not bad at all. Decent detail and shape integrity (the subject matter notwithstanding). Vector Magic also overlays shapes on top of each other, so there’s little concern about editing or printing problems. Matter of fact, if I were looking for a posterized version of my mug, and needed in in vector format, this puppy is pretty well ready to go. Now, I’m not saying that these kind of images are suitable for use in logos. Far from it. Despite Adobe’s claim that their ‘Live Trace’ is “perfect” to creating logo artwork, these kind of illustrations ALWAYS have a brutal construction-paper cut-out vibe to them and don’t have enough fidelity to cut it as a logo. As a logo add-on, they can certainly work (think Shepard Fairey‘s ‘Hope‘ illustration for Barack Obama as an example).

Converting raster logo images to vector graphics?

It always amazes me when business owners ‘lose’ their logo assets and end up with only one file format remaining – some low-resolution RGB jpg that they expect to turn into a pristine print-ready image for use on their business card or letterhead. Ain’t going to happen. A lot of the time, we need to repair their logo, hand-tracing the image in illustrator, adding new font artwork and converting the logo into CMYK or spot-color artwork. Figured I’d give Vector Magic a shot at converting a jpg version of one of our portfolio logos – a highly illustrative design created for radio personality Steve Dahl.

Amazingly, Vector Magic did a really decent job on the illustration portion. The detail held up pretty decently and the program seemed to be able to ‘guess’ what went where without too much trouble (below), especially impressive since, at 300PX x 269PX at 72 dpi, the image was fairly small to begin with.

Don’t get me wrong – the artwork isn’t up to snuff for full color print or anything, but still a decent try if you’re looking to re-size an image (bitmap/raster images tend to turn fuzzy if enlarged, while vector images can be sized up with little issue).

Font conversion. Always an issue.

Like most auto-conversion programs, Vector Magic tends to have an issue with fonts. The human eye is much more forgiving when it comes to abstract shapes that it is when it comes to typography. The brain tends to fill in missing detail so that even a wonky image ‘looks’ like what it’s supposed to (think of the old “is it a vase or two people talking” optical illusion). Font recognition doesn’t work that way – your brain needs to read the words – so any broken or hinky lettering is going to look, well, bad. Let’s take a look how Vector Magic handles the letterforms in our test logo

Not terribly well. To be fair, this was a problem with Streamline and is a problem with Live Trace addition to Illustrator. Actually, Vector Magic seems to handle font recognition better than most. Doesn’t matter though – a quickly converted image that features lettering is still going to require a large amount of hand editing.

Practical applications for the designer.

So, is auto-conversion of logos worth while? Maybe. If it’s for a quick and dirty turnaround, yes. If you’re using the logo for a final file, hand tracing is still the way to go. The amount of time you’ll spend tweaking points and bézier curves would be better spent starting from scratch. However, if you’re after a quick posterization effect (like my toothy visage above) or some illustration backgrounds torn from your fave photo, auto-conversion seems like the way to go.

Automatic raster/bitmap conversion. Some basic tips.

Couple of things I found when playing around. The bigger the image, the better. The program has more pixels to ‘guess’ what the shape’s supposed to be. High contrast photographs work a lot better than lower ones. I also found that by ‘sharpening’ the images in Fireworks (you can do the same thing in Photoshop) the results improved dramatically.

Converting your images.

If you’re a designer who happens to be running Illustrator, Live Trace is worth a shot. If not, Vector Magic is certainly worth checking out. They’ll let you download one or two images for free (that’s how I managed to work with my toothy image from above), there’s a subscription model and a downloadable desktop application if you’re so inclined.

How to draw a perfect cog in under 20 seconds

Steve Douglas — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:22:28 +0000

As we were messing about with a recent logo rework for The Logo Factory, I decided to add some cog elements into the mix. So, how does one get vector artwork of a perfect cog or gear? I’ve never been a fan of clip art (even for simple graphics) so stock art was out. As I wanted to draw a perfectly flat and symmetrical cog, without too many teeth, tracing photography was out too. Needed to create my own from scratch. How? Here’s a very simple technique that you can use to draw a perfect vector cog, using Illustrator, in under 20 seconds.

First, you need to draw out a circle. Hold the ‘shift’ key so that it’s perfectly round. Then, we need to set up the size and shape of teeth. I wanted rounded teeth, so I used an oval shape.

Align the center of the tooth shape with the outside edge of your main circle. Then we need to center the tooth shape vertically, and drag out a cloned copy down to the bottom, once again centering the oval over the outside circumference. Like so.

Once you have your two teeth shape ovals centered vertically, group them as a single object (Apple + G).

Now, we’re going to decide how many teeth your cog has. That’s decided by the number of degrees you’re going to rotate the teeth around our main circle (this is also dictated by the width of the oval you’re going to use for carving out the teeth). For this, you’re going to use the rotate function in our toolbar. Rotating the cogs 90 degrees will give you 4 teeth. 45 degrees 8 teeth. 22.5 degrees will give us 16 teeth. And so on.

For this exercise (and the logo that this artwork was used for) we’re going to need 16 teeth. Simple rotate a clone of our original artwork 22.5 degrees using the rotate and copy function.

Repeat the function (using Apple + D) 7 times, rotating copies of our teeth object right round the circle.

Once all your teeth shapes in place, simply group them up, and using the Pathfinder ‘trim’ function, carve the shapes out of your main circle.

Once the Pathfinder has cut out the teeth shapes, ungroup the objects again (Patherfinder will group them), deselect the main circle and delete our teeth shapes.

And there you have it. A decent looking gear that’s control point light, symmetrical and ready to use in any artwork. Total elapsed time – about 17 seconds.

As mentioned earlier, the same basic idea can be used to develop other types of cogs and gears with various ‘teeth’ shapes. Here’s a more traditionally shaped gear. When using teeth shapes of this nature, there’s additional step to keep in mind. No big deal really – you just have to flip the tooth shape vertically when you drag it out to the bottom of the circle (see below).

Bad designer. No donut.

Steve Douglas — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:29:37 +0000

While a majority of our flash logo animation projects involve logos that we’ve designed at the shop, we also do quite a bit of animation using logos that we didn’t design. We work with quite a few video production houses, as well as one-one-one with clients who have had their logo created somewhere else. Most of the time there’s no issue with using outside material, but once in a while – wow – I’m amazed at what passes off for file prep these days. Working on a flash logo movie for a client (no, I won’t say) who had their logo designed by a logo design company they found on the interpipes (won’t tell you who, but they are in the top 5 Google results if you’re searching for the words logo and design). When we got our mitts on the .EPS files, I was floored at just how badly they were set up.

As the client had only viewed pixel based artworkand didn’t have their own copy of vector based software, to them the logo looks all fine and dandy. Above is what they see when they take delivery of the files from their handy dandly online logo design firm (I’ve close-cropped the design to save anyone the embarassment). Ah, but when we’re importing the artwork into Flash (or anything else for that matter) we’re going to use the vector version. And here’s what that looks like when we toggle off preview mode in Illustrator. Yikes. All these intersecting lines, maniacal miter corners and overlaps just to create an outline around a font?

Makes me wonder if these cats even prep files before shipping digital to unsuspecting clients. This artwork will cause nothing but problems when it comes to any type of digital output, and I can only imagine what would happen if this file ever found them itself becoming acquainted with a vinyl plotter knife blade.

For what it’s worth, here’s what the file should look like once all the vectors have been cleaned up. This file is smaller in size, easier to edit and an be imported into any digital program without fear. The pathfinder operation in Illustrator is fantastic and all for outlines, but ya gotta clean up the auto-acked vectors once it’s finished doing its thing.

While we’re at it – don’t designers close vector shapes any more? I know someone who calls themselves a design firm that doesn’t. The artwork we’re talking about was fairly complicated to begin with (complete with blends and gradient fills) and these incomplete vector objects (circled) serve only to make matters worse. Much worse. Took me a couple of hours to re-do the artwork before I was able to import it into Flash for composition. I pity clients who take delivery of these file formats, without any idea of the headaches – and expense – they’re going to run into down the road when it comes to using their spiffy new logo. Sorry for the Thursday afternoon rant, but butchered art files and logo formats are a pet peeve.