Can this be done?

[Anne Bonny]

Let me just say that MS Paint is about all I know how to use when it comes to picture editing.

Here's my problem: A customer of mine wants business cards made with the logo of his restaurant on it. The logo is currently in black and white, but he wants to add color. I asked for a digital file of the logo, but the best he could do is provide me with a to go menu and have me scan it. He doesnt speak much english, so communication is tough, and he doesnt even know what font was used to make the words.

So all I have is this poor scan. He wants the words "Chai Oriental" and the 3 underlines in red, the coconuts on the right in brown, and the rest in black. Can this be done, and if so, with what program? Anybody want to take a stab at it, or maybe just guide me in the right direction?

[YellerDog]

You're going to have to trace the font, unless you can find the exact one, which is tricky.

You could probably get a good ways into it by downloading Inkscape ( http://www.inkscape.org/ ) and tracing what he's got as carefully as you can with a pen tool. The hard part's going to be reproducing the old stuff, adding color after that is pretty simple stuff.

Read all the FAQ's you can on it.

[Drewbacca]

I don't recommend tracing fonts. There are very few people with the patience to do it properly, or the budget to account for the time it takes to properly do it.

I would try taking that exact thumbnail and posting it on www.typophile.com <-- these guys are REALLY good at identifying fonts. I've used them myself. If you can identify the fonts you can then look them up online and charge him for them (tell him beforehand) so you also get a pretty nice looking font out of it. Barring that idea you could scan it in at like 1200 or 2400 resolution and try manipulating it from there. I would duplicate the card outright on its own layer in Photoshop and try going from there. Then I would print it on a high-end printer to make sure that the lines turned out crisp and clean (if you don't have one try your local Kinko's or whatever, they have nice printers most of the time).

In the end though you should really get the native vector or photoshop files or tell him it can't be done unless he's willing to open his wallet for a healthy dose of production time.

[Kidnemo]

I don't recommend tracing fonts. There are very few people with the patience to do it properly, or the budget to account for the time it takes to properly do it.

Weird, I've never heard of people having much trouble or issue with it.

Maybe I'm just a pen tool master?

[YellerDog]

I've known SEROUS BUSINESS graphic designers to be super-fetishy about fonts, even the slightest nudge off is Total Blasphemy. Not that this is incorrect.

It's not a super huge deal to trace a font. Keep it smooth with a minimum of vertex points, stay zoomed in very very close, booyah.

But if you're not extremely careful, you can fuck it up utterly and completely. So don't fuck it up.

[Dunlap]

If you're lazy like me you could run it through a vectorizer like http://vectormagic.com/ and then change colors and do little crap like the three lines in Illustrator. At the very least I know Vector Magic will convert the text nicely, and it should be able to get the coconuts. I don't think your client is really going to be anal about you hand tracing this stuff...

[YellerDog]

Eggggh. You'd spend more time cleaning that up than drawing it straight-up.

[Kidnemo]

I've known SEROUS BUSINESS graphic designers to be super-fetishy about fonts, even the slightest nudge off is Total Blasphemy.

99% of the time it's the designers that are all pissy about it too, unless you are handling a six figure job for a client, getting the font "close enough" means they most likely won't even notice a difference.

[YellerDog]

This is news you can use.

[Anne Bonny]

Im working with the tracing, and I think Im getting the hang of it. Thanks YellerDog.

Drewbacca, how dare you suggest Kinkos. Youre a bad person.