Logo Touch Up ~ a.k.a. Blogpost 112-3

A  P R O M P T

• How were you able to retouch up a logo from low resolution to making it a high resolution ready for print Vector File? You will eventually have to reproduce a logo in your design experience and the client will hand you a flyer or Ad. Then they will ask you to reproduce the ad with minor changes. Not too hard but then you open the files they gave you and note that the logo is really low resolution. Lastly, they confess they do not have a logo file. You will now have to redesign the file?How are you using these elements and principles to be successful with your own designs, give an example? 
• What were each of the applications uses, explain what you used Illustrator for and what you used Photoshop for? 
• Screenshot your files and drop them here on this post.

 For  our recent logo retouching project, I chose an older-era version of the United Airlines logo, circa 1960. There are a few websites that follow the logo history of various airlines, a topic I find fascinating. One resource I found is 1000logos.net  which has a page showing the United logo throughout time:

 

Looking online I could only find a lower-resolution file of the logo to adapt for colormating. First I put the file Photoshop and adjusted the levels a little bit. Then I put the file  Illustrator to do "live trace." This process makes the logo into a vector file that can be resized without loss of quality.  Luckily, the graphical nature of this United Airlines logo was fairly forgiving as it did not have too many detailed angles to try to replicate from a low-res file. Using the live trace feature for a 2-color graphic I was able to produce something decent looking, close to the original I saw online.

In the process, I made an interesting discovery showing a difference in working with the color picker in Illustrator vs. the color picker in Photoshop. 

This set of screenshots shows my process of color matching in Photoshop CS6:

 

 

This set of screenshots shows my process of color matching in Illustrator CS6:

 

 

 

 

The interesting discovery I made is that when using the color picker in Photoshop and Illustrator to try and match Pantone colors to the CMYK mix I got different results with either program. That surprised me since the whole process is digital. In this case I was choosing from the Pantone "Coated" Color Swatch library.

 

In Photoshop, the picker thought the closest Pantone Red was "Bright Red C" and closest Pantone Blue was "661 C":

 

 

PHOTOSHOP PICKER

 

 

 

In Illustrator, the picker thought the closest Pantone Red was "485 C" and closest Pantone Blue was "7687 C":

 

ILLUSTRATOR PICKER

Generally, a signature logo (like the one for United Airlines) would only have one set of Pantone colors as their "signature" colors. One might need to discuss with the client which colors they prefer. On my screen the Pantone colors I chose in Illustrator colors feel a better match in Pantone (Red: 485 c, Blue 7687 c) than the ones identified by Photoshop. As such, I would suggest to the client to use Pantone Red 485 and Pantone Blue 7687 in future logo-based projects.

 

Actually, I wish United Airlines was my client because I would tell them that it was really a shame that they eliminated their blue and red logo when they merged with Continental Airlines. From my perspective, the best logos from United Airlines were the versions from 1940 - 1961 or the "tulip" versions used from 1974 onwards until the Continental merger.

Prior to this class I have used "live trace" to borrow and adjust logos for some projects inspired by historical typography. Sometimes in order to have things look right you have to touch up an image in photoshop before putting it into illustrator for live trace, especially if it is something you have found off the internet which does not have a higher resolution to work with.

This image shows a newsletter header I created from grabbing an older newspaper graphic from an online archive in .pdf and did some adjustments in photoshop before putting it into illustrator for live trace: 

This shows the original source material from the online .pdf:

An ideal scenario is when you can scan the source material yourself and make a very high resolution high trace. 

Actually...that is my secret trick here. From the archive's .pdf the existing logo was not high-res enough to get a good live trace scan of the image to make it suitable for print. I physically printed out the .pdf and then did a very high resolution scan of the paper printout. From there I was able to make a live trace in Illustrator to get a working file that looked decent to then manipulate the logo for my project. This trick works best with one-color images or things with heavy line quality!