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:”
Lisa is a graphical and pre-press designer with more than 15 years experience. She runs her own agency Twilight Emerald from Ballarat, Victoria Australia.
Traditionally the one colour business card has been the cheapest and simplest option for business card printing. These days however with such cheap prices available for cmyk full colour print it is not always the most popular option for a cheap card.
A lot of smaller offset print shops may still only have a single colour printing press though, so they would still suggest that is their cheapest option for a business card print.
In my opinion you can still get a great look with a single colour card. And as you can pick out a particular pantone ink, you can always rely on your colour printing the same with each different print run – which is not often the case with cmyk. Another advantage of spot colour printing is seen with large solid areas of colour. You will get a much cleaner and more professional finish when using a pantone or ‘spot’ colour.
If you have a logo in a particular colour and you want to reinforce you brand with a particular defining colour, you will definitely want to use a spot colour to achieve this.
In my business if I want someone to do spot colour printing, most often being one or two colour print, I use Jamek Printing
(I also designed their website). They are a small but very reliable printing business that achieve a great result, and I set up a lot of their artwork as well.
The ‘chooko’ business card as shown above is an example of a car printed single sided, single colour (pantone 485) red. This utilizes a lot of solid area so certainly best suited for a pantone spot colour.
Lisa is a graphical and pre-press designer with more than 15 years experience. She runs her own agency Twilight Emerald from Ballarat, Victoria Australia.
