A thorn in the side of most any designer who works with clients is getting them to provide you with content, graphics, logos, etc., in a timely fashion and in a usable format. Logos can be particularly frustrating as many small to medium sized businesses either don't have a professionally designed logo or even more commonly, don't have high resolution artwork of the original design. On more than one occasion here at Element Fusion, a client has responded to a request for a digital version of their logo with the badly compressed logo from their website pasted into a Microsoft Word document. That leaves our designer to either rebuild the logo in a vector format or use a bit of Photoshop trickery to make what we have work. Sure, all of the major applications have some form of bitmap-vector tracing, but the results are typically not useable. Leave it to a few smart graduate students to best the efforts of companies like Adobe who have spent years improving their conversion tools.
Vector Magic (vectormagic.stanford.edu/vectorize) is a research project by James Diebel and Jacob Norda, of the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It is an 100% browser-based tool that allows users to upload a JPG image to be converted to a clean, scalable vector format. For those unaware, photographs and most bitmap graphics are comprised of a multitude of tiny dots called pixels – each one a different color to form the image. With bitmap (or raster) graphics you have a fixed amount of image data to define that image, so enlarging that image doesn't provide more detail, it only makes the "dots" larger. Something like sitting really close to a television screen. Vector graphics are mathematically defined shapes that are often smaller in file size and offer the ability to scale to any size, large or small while retaining perfect image quality. Vector Magic has a simple user-interface that takes users though a simple question-based set of steps to help smooth the conversion.
After uploading your image (I choose a graphic of the Element Fusion logo I had handy), the system begins to ask questions about the quality, amount of compression artifacts, and type of image provided.
Next the system shows the colors found in the image and lets the user determine how many to use in the final graphic. Here I've choose the set of original colors from the graphic. The lighter swatches in the larger sets typically consist of colors use to optically smooth the edges of the shapes in the original raster image.
This screen shows the original image next to the newly created vector image. Several sophisticated tools are presented here that allow you to manually tweak either the original or converted image before re-vectoring. My vector came out nearly perfect the first time so no editing was even needed.
Finally, I chose to download the image in an EPS format and opened it with Adobe Illustrator. The final result is amazing.
Vector Magic really is a magical tool. It is amazing that a simple browser-based application manages to out-perform similar tools included in expensive graphics applications like Adobe Flash and Adobe Illustrator.