How To Make Low Resolution Logos Work
In our previous post "What Are Raster & Vector Images?" we discussed what the advantages and disadvantages of raster & vector images and when you should use the right type. This post is going to go over what happens when a client supplies a low resolution .jpg (raster) and would like to get their logo embroidered on hats for their business, a pretty common scenario for us at ShannonLoren.
Our fake client, Lorem Ipsum - Your Modern Florist, just supplied a .jpg of their logo to us. It is more than likely from their website and it is pretty small and blurry when you increase the size. In order to make this logo viable for embroidery, it needs to be a vector image that the embroidery software can use to calculate how many stitches are used and where they need to be placed. So the first step is to see what we can do to make this logo vector from the .jpg we received.
Research and Design
In terms of design, this is a pretty simple logo, but we need to be able to identify what font is being used, the colors if the client didn't specify and be able to recreate the flower and wave.
After doing a little bit of research and trying to match the font, it appears to be Gotham, which is a fairly popular font. Great, now we need to recreate the graphical elements of the logo using the Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator. With the Pen Tool, we trace around the wave and the flower using points and adjusting curve handles while paying close attention to exactly how everything flows and comes together. We recreate the logo in a completely different, almost harsh color so we can keep track of what has been done and still needs to be worked on.
After we have everything recreated and put together, we need to try and match the colors. Sometimes clients know their Pantone colors (or PMS colors) if the logo uses them, but more often than not they just know it as pink. Since that is the case with this logo, we'll pick the colors off of the image or go to their website (if they had one) and pick them from there.
How Does It Look?
At ShannonLoren, we love creating mockups for our customers to show them how the logo will look on their new product when completed. This way our client has a realistic expectation for how it will look before we start with the actual production. With Lorem Ipsum, we'll use one of our hats as an example.
And viola! The client loves the mockup and has approved it for production.
Conclusion
The entire process from receiving the logo to creating the final mockup for client approval can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour or more. This depends on how complex the logo is and how bad the file that we receive is.
When you provide a file to us at ShannonLoren, we will review it and let you know if it will work for your specific project. If it needs to be vectorized, then we'll let you know how long it will take and go from there.
Do you have a special event coming up, or need to get something personalized for your employees for the holidays? Call us at (248) 544-9600 or email us at branding@shannonloren.com and we'll work with you every step of the way.
