Design Tip/Trick of the Day (Finding Logos)

Design Tip/Trick of the Day

In the design field, the best place to get a vector/high-res logo is directly from the company or design agency. This will guarantee the logo is streamlined, uses the appropriate fonts/colors and a style guide will detail how to use the mark correctly.

However, design students may not have this luxury, and may need a company's logo for a school project. There are several things to try before attempting to recreate a logo freehand. As always, there are several ways to go about this. These aren't the only or best methods. You may have your own preferences.

1. See if you can get the logo from the company, an instructor or from the brand's official website. For example, Xavier University's logo is on their brand website... http://www.xavier.edu/university-communications/brand.cfm

2. Look on Wikipedia. Say I want the UPS logo. I search Wikipedia UPS on google. To the right on UPS' Wikipedia page, you'll see the UPS logo. Click on it. You see underneath the logo that it is called "UPS_logo.svg" (SVG file). Being a SVG file means you're probably in luck. Click on the logo or right click and select "Save Target As..." Save to your desktop or into a designated folder. Now, you can open the SVG file in Illustrator or right click and select "Open With...Adobe Illustrator" or another vector program. Volia! Vector UPS logo.

3. If a company has a corporate website with a search command, Search for "PDF," or "Annual Report." Say I want the AT&T logo. Go to http://www.att.com/. In the Search box type "annual report." I clicked on the first link titled "AT&T Annual Reports | Investor Relations | AT&T." On the next page, I see "Complete 2010 AT&T Annual Report (3.4 MB)," so I right click, select "Save Target As..." and save the pdf on my desktop. Now all I need to do is open the correct page from the PDF in Illustrator and I have the vector AT&T sphere.

4. There are many sites that have user-submitted logos for free, one of the most popular being http://www.brandsoftheworld.com/  Sometimes you'll have to check for inconsistencies in the logo. Since these are user submitted they can be incorrect logos.

5. Contact me. I have collected, recreated, accumulated, etc. over 5,000 logos.

6. Recreate it.

Please be respectable to the logos!