Redrawing a jpg into vector art

Here is a quick video that explains what is involved in taking a jpg and redrawing it into vector art.

What is camera ready, vector art?

If you've landed here, then you've probably sent your logo to be printed on something, and been told its not good and you need "camera ready," or "vector" artwork. And, you probably have no idea what that means.

The term "camera ready" comes from the days when artwork to be printed had to be photographed using very large cameras with high contrast film. The film only picked up whats black on a piece of art, so the art had to be very crisp and pure black and white to photograph correctly.
This film was used to create plates for printing.

Although the cameras are obsolete now, the same type of art is still needed to output digital film. Today, instead of hand creating the art using artboards, the art is created using an illustration program such as Adobe Illustrator.

Vector artwork means that the art is being drawn using lines and curves that are not resolution dependent. The files can be blown up or shrunk down with no loss of detail. Bitmap or jpg type files are made up of tiny pixels that are all shades of color, there are no crisp edges. When it gets blown up, it gets very jaggedy. See below for an example of what a jpg looks like before, and then after, when it has been redrawn into vector.
Redrawing a logo into vector art can be labor intensive, and its not just a matter of saving a jpg as an eps to make it magically convert. It actually has to be hand traced using a mouse, around every part of the artwork. The image below shows the jaggedy image below, and then what is in red is the actual trace around the art to make it crisp and clean. If you need your logo or artwork redrawn into vector, then send me an email for a quote. I am fast and I do not outsource my work overseas.

Why is my eps file no good?

An eps file is not always a vector file. Many times, people think that simply saving a bitmap or jpg file as an eps will make it good, and thats not the case. Art has to be redrawn into vector to be a true useable eps file. See this video for more information:
http://tinyurl.com/bitmaps

Virtual Samples

I'm setting up a new area on my site for providing Virtual Samples. If you've ever needed to show a customer what their logo looks like on a product, this service will be for you.