How to Vectorize a Logo
7 min read
Vectorizing a logo means redrawing a picture made of pixels as a picture made of shapes — outlines and fills with mathematical coordinates instead of a fixed grid of coloured squares. The result scales to any size without softening, prints at any resolution, and can be recoloured or reshaped afterwards.
The reason people search for it is almost always the same emergency: a client has sent their logo as a 400-pixel JPG pulled off their own website, and the printer, the sign maker or the embroiderer has asked for vector. Automatic vectorization gets you most of the way there in a few seconds. The last stretch — exact brand colours and live type — is a few minutes of work in an editor, and this guide is mostly about that stretch.
Find the biggest version that exists before you convert anything
Every pixel of the source is information the tracer gets to use, and a logo pulled from a web page has very few of them. Before converting, spend two minutes looking for a larger one: the favicon folder of the client's site, an old PDF invoice or presentation (open it and export the logo at 300 dpi — it may already be vector), a printed brochure you can scan, or the email signature of somebody who has worked there a long time.
If a 200-pixel JPG is genuinely all that exists, convert it anyway, but expect to clean up. At that size the letterforms have no crisp edges left to find — every boundary is a two- or three-pixel gradient — and the tracer will faithfully reproduce that softness as slightly lumpy curves.
A JPG carries one extra problem a PNG does not: compression artefacts. The blocky halo around high-contrast edges is invisible at a glance and very visible to an edge detector, which reads it as detail and traces it. If your source is a JPG saved at low quality, the fringe is the single biggest thing standing between you and a clean result.
Check the fill count before you check anything else
A two-colour logo should come back as two flat fills. Open the result in Illustrator, Inkscape, Affinity or Figma and look at how many distinct shapes it actually contains. This one check catches nearly every problem worth catching: if a flat navy wordmark has arrived as eleven near-identical blues, the source had compression noise or a soft shadow, and everything downstream — recolouring, separations, the printer's plates — will be a fight.
When the fills are right in number but wrong in value, that is expected and easy. The tracer samples what is actually in the image, which is whatever the JPG compression and the screenshot's colour profile left behind — a brand's #003C71 comes back as #023E70. Select each fill and set the real hex or Pantone value by hand. Two minutes, and it is the difference between a logo that matches the brand guide and one that nearly does.
Set the wordmark in live type, vectorize only the symbol
Traced letterforms are never as good as the real font. They are close — often close enough that nobody notices on a business card — but at billboard size the difference between a real curve and a traced approximation of one is exactly where the eye goes. Stems wobble by a fraction of a millimetre, terminals round off, and the spacing is frozen at whatever the source image had.
So identify the typeface and set the text properly. WhatTheFont, Font Squirrel's Matcherator and Adobe's own font matching will name most commercial faces from a clean crop. Then vectorize the symbol or monogram only, and set the wordmark in live text beside it — which also means the logo can be re-set at a different size or tracking later without redoing anything.
If the face is unidentifiable, custom, or heavily modified, trace the type as well and then spend the time on the two or three letters that carry the most weight. Nobody examines a lowercase 'n'; everybody looks at the capital.
SVG, and what to do when somebody asks for something else
SVG is what you get, and for almost every use it is what you want. Every current design tool imports it, browsers render it natively, cutting software takes it, and it is a text format you can open and read if you ever need to know what is actually in the file.
What you will not get is EPS, PDF, DXF or AI. There is no converter for any of them in the pipeline, and asking for one is refused at the API rather than accepted and quietly failed later.
That matters in exactly one situation: an older screen-printing or sign-making shop whose RIP predates SVG and asks for EPS by name. Open the SVG in Illustrator, Inkscape or Affinity and save the file they asked for — it is one keystroke on the same paths, and it is a step your editor does better than a conversion service would.
Step by step
- 01
Find the largest source available
Check old PDFs, print files and email signatures before settling for a website JPG. Every extra pixel is information the tracer can use.
- 02
Upload it
Drag the file onto the workspace. PNG, JPEG, WebP and BMP are all accepted, and the file type is read from the bytes rather than the extension.
- 03
Check the settings
There is nothing to choose about the format — the result is an SVG. Everything else about the conversion is decided automatically from the image.
- 04
Convert and open the result
Download the SVG and open it in Illustrator, Inkscape, Affinity or Figma.
- 05
Fix colours and type
Set each fill to the real brand value, and replace any traced wordmark with live text in the identified typeface.
Common problems
- The logo came back with dozens of nearly identical colours
- The source is a JPG with compression artefacts, or it has a soft drop shadow. Find a PNG version if one exists. If not, select-by-similar-colour in your editor and merge the near-duplicates into one fill — this is much faster than it sounds, and only needs doing once.
- Edges look slightly lumpy or wobbly
- The source was too small; the tracer is faithfully reproducing anti-aliased pixels that were never a clean edge. On Pro and above, raise smoothing. Below that, the fastest fix is a bigger source image.
- There is a white rectangle behind everything
- The source was flattened onto a white background — a JPG always is, since JPEG has no transparency. The background comes back as its own shape; select it and delete it. Starting from a transparent PNG avoids this entirely.
- Thin strokes have disappeared
- A hairline that was one pixel wide in the source has no interior for the tracer to fill. Enlarge the source before converting, or on Pro and above raise the detail level so finer features survive the merge step.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I vectorize a logo for free?
- Yes. The preview on the home page needs no account at all, and a free account converts 10 images a month at up to 2 megapixels with no card required. That is enough for the usual case of one logo that needs rescuing.
- Will the vectorized logo match the brand colours exactly?
- Not automatically, and no automatic tool can. The tracer samples the colours that are actually in the image, and a JPG that has been through compression and a screenshot no longer holds the original values. Set the real hex or Pantone numbers by hand after converting — it takes about two minutes and is the step that makes the difference.
- Is the result good enough for large-format printing?
- The geometry is resolution-independent, so it prints at any size. Whether it looks right at that size depends on the source: a logo traced from a 2000-pixel PNG holds up on a vehicle wrap, one traced from a 200-pixel favicon will show its origins. Check the result at full size before sending it.
- What if the logo has a gradient?
- Gradients are approximated as bands of flat colour rather than reproduced as gradient fills. For a logo that usually reads as wrong, so the honest answer is to rebuild the gradient by hand on top of the traced shape — which is quick once the outline is correct.
Related guides
- How to Vectorize an Icon — Turn a pixel icon into a crisp, single-weight vector that scales from a 16px favicon to an app tile.
- How to Vectorize for Screen Printing and Textiles — Prepare artwork for screens, DTG and heat transfer: flat separations and shapes an ink can sit inside.
- How to Vectorize a Flyer or Poster for Large Format — Rescue a flat design for A1 and larger without the soft edges — and know which parts not to convert.