Transcript:
[MUSIC] This is Nick with logosbyniccom. And in this tutorial, I’ll be demonstrating how you can trace a vector copy of a rasterized PNG logo using Adobe Illustrator, But before we get started. If you’d like to sharpen your logo design skills, be sure to check out my logo Design Academy. It’s an 18 part video series where I outline my entire creative process for coming up with logo ideas from start to finish. I’ll have a link in the description of the video. If you want to check that out so to get us started here in illustrator? We just want to make sure we are all working with a similar setup, so come up here to where it says view and make sure you have nothing enabled here. If there’s anything enabled like, snap to pixel or smart guys, just go ahead and disable that and then over here where it says window we’re going to want control, color and Pathfinder enabled. And that’s going to be these menus over here, and once you have that set, we’re good to import the logo that you want to trace now, so I’m going to come up here to where it says file, and I’m going to choose place and I’m going to use the Starbucks logo as an example Because I feel like this logo is a good example to work with. Let me place this on the page here. Let me center it up on the canvas, and I’m just going to scale it down a little bit. So it fits within the page border there now to scale it. I’m just holding shift and alt to lock the proportions and scale it from the center like that. Okay, so when we want to trace a vector copy of a logo with illustrator, there’s two different ways to do it. Number one. There’s a way to automatically trace it using the auto trace or the image trace trace feature and then number two if the image trace feature doesn’t work like, for example, Let’s say your design is too complicated for it to, uh, work. You have to manually trace it. I’m going to show you how to do both in this video. So if there’s one particular method, you’d like to learn over the other, just check this the time stamps of the video so to start out, we’re going to use the, uh, image trace feature. So let me come up here to where it says window and click on. I’m going to look for image Trace, which is right there. It should open up this little menu right here, and I’m going to select the logo. Make sure you have it selected and I’m going to click on preview to see what this looks like. Now, if you notice here, this logo is a good example, because it’s really simple. There’s a lot of contrast between the the logo and the background. So the AI here did a really good job of differentiating. Uh, what needs to be traced? So this works well? The thing is, it’s in black and white. So this is a green logo. I’m going to where it says mode. I’m going to choose this. I’m going to choose color here, and you’ll have to give it a second for it to, uh, to to render, and there you go, That’s what it looks like after its trace, so I’m going to go ahead and deselect preview. I’m going to click on trace. We can close out of that menu. Now, and what you want to do now is with this selected, go to object expand. Click, OK, then go to object Ungroup and then do that one more time object Ungroup. Now let me zoom out a little bit by holding Alt and rolling down the mouse wheel. I want to take this and bring it off of the canvas, and then I want to zoom in by holding Alt and rolling up the mouse wheel, so let’s click off of the graphic to deselect everything and let’s take this white background and just press delete on the keyboard to get rid of that. And let’s zoom in here, lets. Take this object. Get rid of that! Get rid of that again to do this. I’m just clicking on it and pressing. Delete, get rid of that. Get rid of that and now we can take this and bring this back into the center of the page here, and as you can see, we have traced a vector copy of our PNG logo using Adobe Illustrator. So let me zoom in to show you as you can see. This is a vector This does not become pixelated as you zoom in and out you can edit the individual anchor points of this design the same way you would any other vector graphic. Okay, so that is how you can do that with the image trace feature. So let me go ahead and close out of that. Let me get rid of that design now. Let’s say you have a really complicated design where the image trace feature doesn’t work. If that’s the case, then you’ll have to manually Trace a new, uh, logo over your design. So let me show you how to do that. Let me import the design back in here by going to file place. There it is now let me center that up on the canvas scale that down a little bit there. We go okay, so when you manually trace a logo. The first thing you want to look at is if there’s any common shapes when I when I talk about common shapes, I’m talking about Rectangles, circles and Ellipses, polygons, so on and so forth as you can see this design here, It’s overall a circle, so I can make use of this without having to manually Draw a circle. I can just use the circles and Ellipses tool. If you right, click on this tool right here. Now I’m going to click and drag to create a circle going over the top of this right here. I’m going to hold shift to lock the proportion, so that’s a perfectly round circle, just like that and let me just make this a different color, so I can see I can see what’s. Uh, how this looks in comparison to the logo behind it. Maybe I’ll go with that there, and I want to bring down the opacity of this A little bit as well so I can see where it lines up with the rest of the design. Okay, so once you’ve done that, let me grab the select tool. Let me scale this up when you’re scaling. Make sure you hold shift. So it locks the proportions, and it remains a perfectly round circle. I just want to make sure that this circle fits the circle of the logo here. That’s looking pretty good again to zoom in and out. I’m holding Alt and rolling up and down the mouse wheel to move the page around. I’m pressing down the space bar and clicking and dragging. So let me scale this down a little bit, okay. That’s pretty good right there. That’s close enough, so now we have the circle part of the design intact. What we have to do now is manually draw objects tracing around the outline of this. Uh, of this illustration here now to do that. We have two different tools. We have the pen tool and then we have the curvature pen tool. Now, if your design has lots of straight lines, unlike this design, then I would recommend using the pen tool because the pen tool is good for drawing straight lines like that, but if your design is like this where there’s lots of wavy, curved lines and stuff, you’re going to want to use the curvature pen tool because this makes it easier to draw curved lines. Okay, so once you’ve done that, I’m going to start over here with the crown over here, so let me go to the curvature pen tool, and I’m going to click right here to create a point and I’ll click over here to create a point and it’s going to give you a blue line, indicating where the edge of the object you’re drawing is going to go and click over here. Now, once I get to a corner, I don’t want to just click, because it’s going to create another rounded point like that. We want to create a sharp corner so to do that. I’m going to hold Alt and then click, and that will allow you to create a corner, so let me come up here. Hold Alt, click to create a corner now while you’re drawing the fill may get in the way, so you you might want to come over to the opacity and bring that down, so you can see where you’re tracing a little better. I’m going to click to create a point right here. Hold Alt, click right there now. If you notice my lines aren’t exactly flush against the lines of the design. I’m just doing this really quick, really quickly for, like a rudimentary design. If you want, you could be more careful. If you don’t like the placement of your design, you can just press Ctrl Z to delete the most recent point and then try again. The curvature tool is a little tricky When you, um, when you’re using it for the first time holding Alt to create a corner right there again holding Alt, create a corner right there once again, another corner now right here. This is a straight line, so I’m going to hold Alt and there we go. It creates a corner point from one corner from one corner point to another. You get a straight line, Same thing up here holding alt the whole time to create this star because this is a series of straight lines. Well, this one’s a little curved, so I’ll put that as it is. Bring this one over here like this. Don’t like the placement of that one. There we go that looks better. Hold Alt to create a point and I’m sure you get the idea now. This is one of those things where it takes a little bit of practice to get the hang of it. Now, once you want to close the shape back to the original point, you want to hold alt on the keyboard and then click it to create that corner there. Otherwise it’s going to create a rounded corner right there. So there we have that shape. Once we’ve made that shape, I want to grab the select tool with this selected and then hold shift and click on the circle behind it and then come over here to the Pathfinder, where it says shape modes. I’m going to click on this one right here that says minus front, and it punched a hole in the design, right there in the shape of that crown that we just traced. And if you bring this off of the canvas, you can see, we are well on our way to tracing the rest of this logo. So let me put that back where it was by pressing Ctrl Z. Now I can go ahead and manually draw this shape right here with the pen tool as you can see, this can just be a series of straight lines. As far as I can tell and there we go let me bring the opacity of that down a little bit, so it matches, and there you go now what I’m going to do now is I’m just going to go through here and trace all of this all of these individual objects and minus them from the circle as you saw. I just did here so ill. Go ahead and do that real quick and I’ll catch up with you. When I’m done, okay, so as you can see here. I have finished tracing over the logo design, so I’m going to take the original logo and just move this off of the page like that. And now I can click and drag over everything that I’ve just drawn here. I could bring the opacity all the way up and I can go ahead and make this the same color that this is by using the dropper tool over here. And there you go and as you can see if you zoom in this is indeed a vector tracing, whereas this is a raster where it’s made of pixels. Okay, so, um, that is how you can manually trace a PNG logo to vector using illustrator. So let me get rid of the original logo. There and I think that should do it for this tutorial. That’s how you can go about creating vector tracings of your PNG logos using Adobe Illustrator. If you have any questions, leave a comment below and as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you?