Rebuilding a mark that only exists as a photograph

The job you will actually be given

A client has a logo. It exists on a printed visiting card from 2009, a shop board, and a WhatsApp forward at 480 pixels wide. There is no file. Nobody knows who made it. They want it on a hoarding next week.

This is one of the most common paid jobs in the trade, and there is a method.

Step one: get the best source you can

Rank what they can give you:

1. The original artwork file, if anyone still has it. Ask the previous printer: small shops keep CDR files for years and will often hand them over.
2. A printed piece you can scan. A visiting card at 1200 dpi on a flatbed is enormously better than any photograph. Ask them to courier one.
3. A flat, square-on photograph in even light. Not at an angle, not in sunlight with a shadow across it.
4. The 480 px WhatsApp image, which is where most jobs start.

Even at (4) you can work, because you are not going to trace it. You are going to measure it.

Step two: correct the perspective

A photograph of a shop board is a trapezoid. Fix it before you draw, in GIMP or Photopea, both free:

• GIMP: Tools ▸ Transform Tools ▸ Perspective. Drag the four corners onto the four corners of the sign.
• Photopea: Edit ▸ Free Transform, then Ctrl+drag a corner handle.

Then Levels, so the ink is black and the board is white, and rotate so the baseline is horizontal. Five minutes here saves an hour of drawing something slightly skewed.

Step three: lock it as a template

Place the image on its own layer. Set the opacity to about 30%. Lock the layer. In Inkscape, Layer ▸ Add Layer, then the lock icon in the Layers dialog; in Illustrator, the Layers panel’s lock column and Template option in the layer’s options, which also dims it automatically.

Locking is not optional. An unlocked template gets selected and nudged, and you will redraw everything against a reference that has moved.

Step four: identify what it is made of, before drawing anything

Look at the mark and answer three questions.

• Is the type a known typeface? Upload the image to a font identifier, or look at distinguishing letters: the g, the a, the R leg, the terminals. If you can identify it, set it as live type and you are 80% done. If you cannot, ask whether it was ever meant to be that face, or whether it was hand-drawn.
• Which parts are primitives? Circles, squares, arcs, regular polygons. Draw these with the shape tools, not the pen. The 2009 designer used the same tools you have.
• What is the construction? Is the swoosh a circle with a wedge removed? Is the monogram two letters overlapped? Find the underlying geometry and build it that way.

Step five: draw, then verify against the original

Draw over the template with primitives, booleans and the pen. Then check, in this order:

1. Overlay test. Put your version at 50% opacity directly over the original at 100%. Every edge should coincide. Where it does not, fix yours, or decide deliberately to improve it and tell the client.
2. Flip test. Mirror your version horizontally and look at it. Asymmetries you stopped noticing become obvious.
3. Small-size test. 16 px, black on white.
4. Node count. Under fifty for a typical mark. If you are at two hundred, you traced when you should have drawn.

What to tell the client

Be straight about two things.

It will not be identical. A reconstruction from a photograph is your best reading of somebody else’s geometry. Curves will differ by a fraction of a millimetre. Say so before you start, and show the overlay so they can see how close it is.

You are redrawing, not inventing. The rights in the original mark belong to whoever owned them; redrawing it for the same owner is ordinary practice. Redrawing somebody else’s mark for a new client is not, and it is a trademark problem rather than a technical one. If the brief smells like that, ask who owns it.

Charge for it properly

This is skilled work with a clear deliverable. Two to four hours for a typical mark, plus the delivery pack. Clients routinely expect it free because “you just have to copy it”. It is the opposite of copying: it is reconstruction from evidence, and it is worth saying so once, politely, in the quote.