I just found a very cool web app that I wanted to share. In fact, it’s so cool that it is not only going in the “Web App Review” section of my site, but ALSO the “Design Tips” section. It’s just that cool.
One major issue I’ve run into when building a website for a smaller local company is what I like to call “logo blues”. Logo blues come in many varieties. Here are a few you may have heard in no particular order:
- “Here is our logo” (hands over a business card)
- “Here is our logo” (hands over logo xeroxed on a sheet of paper)
- “Here is our logo” (emails Word doc with low-res logo file pasted into it)
- “Here is our logo” (emails low res version of logo)
These items quickly jump from logo blues to logo nightmares when the client mentions that this is the only format they have their logo in. What usually follows is a long messy journey through Photoshop using lots of sharpen filter, contrast and other such nonsense. It’s even worse if you need a vector image because in that case you often need to retrace the whole image using the pen tool.
Enter Vector Magic…
Vector Magic is an Adobe Flex app that lets you upload an image (jpg, bmp, tiff, png, gif, even psd) and convert it to a clean vector image. The service is free if you are ok outputting a png with a Vector Magic trademark on it. EPS files cost 1 credit which translates out to $2.95 (or $2.20 if you order before 4/12/08). The quality is pretty amazing especially for solid color logos. The time this tool could save you, especially if you need a vector version of the logo or image, is awesome.
I tested out Vector Magic, first using their own logo. Here is a sample of the quality. The image on the left is the original and the right is the clean vector version:
Next I tried Google’s logo. The gradients gave VM a little bit of trouble, but still pretty good job for how easy and quick the tool is to use:
Lastly, I tried a photo. Again for how simple this app is to use, I think this is pretty impressive:
I should add that there are some editing features that appear to give you quite a lot of power to clean up the image. I didn’t use editing for any of my samples so these are just raw right through the VM engine.
All-in-all Vector Magic looks like a very cool tool and I am excited to use it on a real project in the future.
