Case Studies

Rescuing the Fall Fishing Logo

The Project

Another pro-bono project from 2014 which was the anniversary celebration of the Annual Nipigon Fall Fishing Festival. I was asked to create a logo graphic that could be used on a considerable banner poster for the event. The problem was the only version of the logo they had was a small scan from a low resolution printed copy.

A Note on images and logos

Images and logos for display purposes are specifically designed for individual purposes. A newspaper version of your logo will be very low resolution, scanning a newspaper logo also adds the paper texture, erroneous colours and all sorts of nice things. When your designer gives you those large files that you have no idea what they are, THEY ARE IMPORTANT! Usually the designer will give you very large versions of the graphics/logos or better still what they call a vector version.

All images can be enlarged, some will pixelate (tiny squares that make up the graphic that become bigger squares, and others (vectors) can be scaled to any size with no pixelation. Vector form logos and graphics should be saved somewhere and never forgotten about – this is your identity.

Image preparation

A scanned low-resolution image is not an ideal place to start when your end product is a vector image scalable to any size. Using the automatic functions in Adobe Photoshop to clean up the paper texture, erroneous colours and smooth some of the image and then to separate the image into its two principal parts, the text and the fisherman.

Onto Adobe illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is an industry standard graphics design tool that creates vector images that can be scale-able to any size. By bringing the cleaned up image from Photoshop into Illustrator, one can convert the image into a vector image. Which is great if you have a lovely clean image to start with, not so much in this case as the scanned, low resolution leads to numerous artefacts or distortions in the output that needed cleaning and in some cases a redesign from scratch.

After multiple edits and manipulations between Photoshop and Illustrator, the below image was created which has fewer artefacts and distortions and is in a vector format. Looks pretty good, remember this is going to be blown up to a considerable size. This amplifies the artefacts and distortions and to make a lovely smooth image at any size requires some fine editing in Illustrator to remove, smooth and fill in all those little distortions.

The end product

The end product, a fully rejuvenated logo that is vector based and can be scaled to any size for any artwork. It can even be modified, so the white becomes transparent for websites and other applications.