The two logos above are a good example of the process of converting from an illustration to a vector and a situation in which this process might need to be employed. There are different approaches to this and I thought I’d share using this example to highlight them.
In this instance, a shire council in rural Victoria, Australia held a competition asking local young people to help choose their logo and visual identity which was to be used on their website and also offline in their print masthead and other materials including large signs. The winning “logo” design, pictured top, happened to be hand drawn in felt-tipped pen (or texta). To be used professionally and to be resized, an amateur design such as this has to be converted into a vector format.
Twilight Emerald was employed to supply the vector art and the result, pictured below, was a manual trace using the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator.
Although Illustrator also has ‘Live Trace’, personally I find it currently doesn’t do a great job for anything even slightly complex. The original illustration just doesn’t look quite the same using that process alone. The Live Trace can work with artistic renditions of a photos, or if a job doesn’t need to be exact. But you can’t beat a manual trace for real attention to detail and accuracy. The final product is far more editable as well. For example, you could change spot colours in specific areas of the illustration to create. Not every designer is up to the task of a manual trace so clients need to be selective of designers with this capability.
Have any experiences with illustrations to vector ? Prefer to use Live Trace or Manual Trace ? If so please feel free to share:”
