this is nick with URL_TOKEN and in this tutorial i'll be demonstrating how you can trace a vector copy of a rasterized png logo using adobe illustrator but before we get started if you'd like to sharpen your logo design skills be sure to check out my logo design academy it's an NUMBER_TOKEN part video series where i outline my entire creative process for coming up with logo ideas from start to finish i'll have a link in the description of the video if you want to check that out so to get us started here in illustrator we just want to make sure we are all working with a similar setup so come up here to where it says view and make sure you have nothing enabled here if there's anything enabled like snap to pixel or smart guys just go ahead and disable that and then over here where it says window we're going to want control color and pathfinder enabled and that's going to be these menus over here and once you have that set we're good to import the logo that you want to trace now so i'm going to come up here to where it says file and i'm going to choose place and i'm going to use the starbucks logo as an example because i feel like this logo is a good example to work with let me place this on the page here let me center it up on the canvas and i'm just going to scale it down a little bit so it fits within the page border there now to scale it i'm just holding shift and alt to lock the proportions and scale it from the center like that okay so when we want to trace a vector copy of a logo with illustrator there's two different ways to do it number one there's a way to automatically trace it using the auto trace or the image trace trace feature and then number two if the image trace feature doesn't work like for example let's say your design is too complicated for it to uh work you have to manually trace it i'm going to show you how to do both in this video so if there's one particular method you'd like to learn over the other just check this the time stamps of the video so to start out we're going to use the uh image trace feature so let me come up here to where it says window and click on i'm going to look for image trace which is right there it should open up this little menu right here and i'm going to select the logo make sure you have it selected and i'm going to click on preview to see what this looks like now if you notice here this logo is a good example because it's really simple there's a lot of contrast between the the logo and the background so the ai here did a really good job of differentiating uh what needs to be traced so this works well the thing is it's in black and white so this is a green logo i'm going to where it says mode i'm going to choose this i'm going to choose color here and you'll have to give it a second for it to uh to to render and there you go that's what it looks like after its trace so i'm going to go ahead and deselect preview i'm going to click on trace we can close out of that menu now and what you want to do now is with this selected
START_SELFPROMO_TOKEN before we get started if you'd like to sharpen your logo design skills be sure to check out my logo design academy it's an NUMBER_TOKEN part video series where i outline my entire creative process for coming up with logo ideas from start to finish i'll have a link in the description of the video if you want to check that out END_SELFPROMO_TOKEN