Graphics professionals often face the problem of finding vector or high resolution bitmap corporate logos. Penetrating the corporate veil in order to find the in-house graphics department may prove fruitless and time-consuming.
We’ve found that a quick search of the corporate website can yield results. Here’s how we do it:
If the site has a search function, enter pdf. If there is no search function, go to the site map and look for brochures, annual reports, or any other resources that might logically exist in a pdf format.
Download the pdf.
Open the pdf in Acrobat Reader and search for a logo. Note the page.
In Illustrator, go to file|open. Select the pdf. A pop-up window will open with a thumbnail of page one. Select the page that has the logo.
Click OK.
Elements on the page may be grouped and could include masks, compounds, and other special effects, so in the view menu, select outline. This puts you in a wireframe mode. Imported bitmap images will now appear as bounding boxes. Take the direct selection tool (the hollow arrow) and begin deleting all elements except the logo.
When the logo has been isolated, save the document as an Illustrator file (.ai).
There’s a huge database of corporate logos at Brands of the World, but use our method if you don’t find what you need there.
This is very interesting, but is there a way to automatically extract millions of company logos from an already existing database? That would aid greatly in a wide variety of projects.
A very cool idea.
It is unlikely that any such database exists. I can imagine that a spider could be programmed to crawl the web looking for pdfs. The pdfs could be batched, opened and vector graphics extracted, but I imagine that it would be an enormously complex project. Also, it would take people to look at the results and decide what might be useful, and what might not. Keeping the database current would be a permanent undertaking. There would also be the legal hurdles.
I run into this all the damn time. It never occurred to me to raid the PDF libraries. Thanks for this!