How to Vectorise a Logo (Free Methods + When to Pay £39)

Quick answer

You can vectorise a logo yourself, free, with Inkscape’s Trace Bitmap or Illustrator’s Image Trace, the walkthrough is below, and on a simple high-contrast mark it can genuinely pass. Whether it did pass is decided by one check: the 500% zoom test. Logos with text, fine detail or gradients usually fail it, which is when the honest answer is a £39 manual redraw (24-hour turnaround) rather than another evening of fighting the tracer.

First, know what you’re attempting

Vectorising means converting a pixel image (JPG/PNG) into mathematical curves (SVG/EPS/AI) that scale to any size, the format every printer, signwriter and embroiderer needs, as our file formats guide explains. There are two fundamentally different ways to get there. Auto-tracing: software finds edges in your pixels and fits curves to them, fast, free, and faithful to every flaw in the source, including flaws you can’t see at normal zoom. Manual redrawing: a human rebuilds the logo as it was designed to be, resetting text in the real typeface. Everything below is about doing the first well and recognising when only the second will do.

DIY or pay: the decision at a glance

The DIY walkthrough (Inkscape, free)

1. Start from your best source. The largest, cleanest version of the logo you can find, PNG beats JPG, original beats forwarded. Five minutes hunting a better source (see our file inventory checklist) improves the result more than any setting. 2. Import into Inkscape (free from inkscape.org) and open Path → Trace Bitmap. 3. For most logos choose single-colour or limited-colour tracing, “Colours” at 2–6, rather than photographic modes; logos are flat shapes, and fewer colours means cleaner paths. 4. Trace, then inspect immediately at high zoom, don’t judge at fit-to-screen. 5. Tidy: delete stray specks (compression artefacts become tiny islands), smooth obviously wobbly nodes, and check shapes that should be identical (letter O’s, repeated elements) actually are. 6. Export as SVG (native) and EPS, and keep the Inkscape file as your working master. Illustrator’s Image Trace follows the same logic with finer controls (paths/corners/noise sliders and a proper preview).

The 500% test, the only verdict that counts

Zoom your traced result to 500% next to the original. Pass: smooth curves, crisp corners, letterforms that are exactly, not approximately, the right shapes. Fail: wobbling outlines (the tracer followed compression noise), rounded-off corners, merged letter pairs (“rn” → “m” is the classic), or gradients turned into banded stripes. Be brutal here, because vinyl cutters and large-format printers will be: everything you can see at 500% on screen appears at roughly van-side size in the real world. Text is where to look first, it fails first, and it’s the failure everyone notices.

Fixing the three most common trace failures

If your trace nearly passes, three targeted repairs are worth trying before giving up. Wobbly outlines: re-run the trace with higher smoothing/lower detail settings, counterintuitively, less faithful tracing often looks better, because the “detail” being captured is compression noise. In Inkscape, raise the Smooth corners value; in Illustrator, lower Paths and raise Noise. Speckle islands: tiny stray shapes scattered around the mark are artefact debris, select-same-fill then delete clears them in one pass. Almost-right text: don’t repair traced letters node by node (a rabbit hole with no bottom); instead identify the typeface, free tools like WhatTheFont get you close from a screenshot, delete the traced text entirely, and re-set it live over the layout. That last technique is genuinely the professional method, and if you pull it off, your DIY result jumps a quality class. If the typeface can’t be identified or matched, that’s usually the moment the £39 redraw earns its fee, typeface matching against a specimen is craft, not settings.

Mistakes that waste the evening

Learn from the common wrecks: tracing a screenshot of the logo instead of hunting the best original (garbage in, mathematically precise garbage out); tracing the version with a background baked in, then fighting to remove it, crop and clean the source first; judging the result at fit-to-screen where everything looks fine; exporting only an SVG and calling it done when the printer needs EPS and the everyday uses need PNGs; and the subtle one, colour, auto-traces sample colours from compressed pixels, so your brand blue comes out as five near-blues; flatten each element to the single correct value before export (colour references live on your brand usage sheet, if you have one). Every item on this list costs ten minutes to avoid and an hour to discover; that asymmetry is the whole guide in miniature.

When DIY is the right call, and when it’s false economy

DIY wins: simple geometric marks, high-contrast sources, no text or only large text, screen-bound uses, and you within reach of an evening’s patience. Pay wins: any logo with text (resetting type in the true typeface is the professional difference no tool replicates), fine detail or gradients, low-res or printed-only sources, and anything destined for permanent production, signage, vehicles, embroidery, where a subtle flaw is reproduced large and often. The arithmetic is unsentimental: a £39 manual redraw is less than one round of reprinted flyers, and the full market pricing (including what freelancers and agencies charge for the same job) is in our logo file conversion cost guide.

When your only source is printed (scan technique)

Sometimes no digital file survives at all, the logo exists on a letterhead, a business card, a van. A decent scan or photo makes a workable trace source if you stack the odds: scan at 600dpi or photograph in bright indirect daylight, square-on to avoid perspective distortion (or fix it with your phone’s document mode, which handles both perspective and lighting surprisingly well); choose the largest printed instance you can find, the van door beats the business card by an order of magnitude; and if the print has texture (embroidery, textured paper), photograph flatter-looking alternatives first. Clean the scan before tracing: crop tight, bump contrast so the logo separates cleanly from the background, and remove any background colour. From a good 600dpi scan of a decently-sized print, both DIY tracing and the professional redraw work well, this is exactly the “photo of your van” scenario the rescue guide mentions, and it recovers more logos than people expect.

The honest scorecard, before you start

To save you reading this twice: give DIY a serious go if your logo is geometric, text-free or big-text-only, and your source is clean, expect an hour, maybe two, and a real chance of a pass. Go straight to the £39 redraw if the logo contains small text, script lettering, gradients or fine detail, if your best source is compressed or printed, or if the destination is permanent (van, sign, embroidery), the failure modes there aren’t worth an evening of discovery. And if you DIY and pass, one last professional habit: date-stamp the master file name and never edit the master directly, every future variation is a copy. That single habit is why designers’ files survive decades and everyone else’s need this article.

Whichever route: finish the job properly

A vectorised logo isn’t done until it’s a usable pack: export colour, all-white and all-black versions, plus transparent PNGs for everyday use, and store everything in two places (the complete handover checklist shows the full set worth keeping). If your DIY trace passed the test, congratulations, genuinely; you’ve saved £39 and learned a tool. If it didn’t, no shame either: the redraw exists precisely because this job is harder than it looks, and it’s on the price list for less than most people’s evening is worth.