I had an extension built last year by DEP Building Services of Caterham. As a favour to them this year as they did a great job, a built them a wordpress site as they didn’t have one already. It was a fairly standard build about from that they already had a logo, but they didn’t have the vector / illustrator / eps original file. I think it was a classic case where someone had done some work for them (business cards with logo and some display material, boards and banners for putting up on their build sites) but they hadn’t given them the original logo files to work with again, and this company could not be contacted now.
I’m no graphic designer and I don’t have any of the Adobe licences or equivalent, and frankly I don’t want to buy or invest in anything like this as it’s not an area of interest for me, but I managed to get a really professional job done for nearly free using the following services:
- I used the http://vectormagic.com/ website to get a hand tracing done of the existing logo (scanned from an old grubby business card). this only cost 15 USD but was fast and excellent service. They do have a free version online, but it was worth the 15 USD to get a proper AI file fully done.
- I downloaded and used the https://inkscape.org/en/ freeware tool to edit the image and produce scaled transparent PNG files for the website. Even for a newbie like me this only took 10 minutes to work out. This is an excellent free tool and well recommended.
The end result being that I have the master AI file for the logo and as many scalable copies as I need for other media, for only 15 dollars.
