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I'm not a graphic-designer. A friend of mine is - a retired one. I asked him to design a logo for my company. He does not know how to use a PC/Mac for design tasks so he did it on paper. It looks great.

He gave me a drawing which describes the lines to be drawn (widths, endpoints), the distances and the angles of each. The geometrical characteristics.

What tool should I use to create a vectorized version of this? Ideally an open-source-tool.

I'm a programmer, I naturally thought about turtle-graphics (with gnuplot as an example). But I'm sure that there are more powerful tools which will let me colorize the logo once the geometrical description is imported.

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  • I thought designing is what you do in your head. The representation (paper, screen) is just a tool. In what way does your comment help me? – Patrick B. May 19 '16 at 8:26
  • I agree, my comment was not constructive. There are many tools available for the job: inkscape, xara, etc. I would avoid CAD software. – Luciano May 19 '16 at 8:35
  • How complex is the logo? You could always just write the SVG code yourself in any text editor. How easy that will be depends on how complex the logo is and how exactly you have paths and coordinates etc described. – Cai May 19 '16 at 9:13
  • @Cai I wasn't aware that SVG is just xml. I will go this way. If you make your comment an answer, I'll accept it. – Patrick B. May 19 '16 at 14:54
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You can take a good photo of the logo, or have it scanned.

Then use Inkscape to trace it acordingly to the instructions with the photo as a base.

Edited.

You can not trace a logo using formulas, but yes, if a logo has parameters you can use them, for example, the line A is one thirth of the line B.

The total width is 20 times larger than the stroke C.

The angle of the line D is 30°.

Of course you can use the parameters.

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  • I would have preferred a solution where I describe the graphic. Using coordinate and angles and geometrical functions. Does inkscape support this kind of design-help? – Patrick B. May 19 '16 at 8:57
  • @PatrickB. yes but you could actually type those with a text editor – joojaa May 19 '16 at 9:44
  • I added a note based on this comment. – Rafael May 19 '16 at 14:06
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SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is an XML based vector image format. You can use your coordinates and path descriptions to write your SVG code directly in any text editor.

You describe your image using SVG path elements, using various drawing commands as well as basic shape elements in combination with fills and strokes etc. You can find more info on SVG paths and shapes here:

How easy it will be to convert your logo to SVG depends on how complex the logo is and how exactly you have paths and coordinates etc described. You can read more on SVGs coordinate system and units here:

Further reading resources:

Another option is to describe your logo with EPS (Encapsulated PostScript). Whereas SVG is simply an XML format, PostScript is a programming language in itself. I'm not familiar with writing PostScript so I couldn't give any advice on that but it is another option to consider.

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  • I think eps is better for decribing things – joojaa May 19 '16 at 20:03
  • Very possibly, I'm not too familiar with writing postscript though – Cai May 19 '16 at 20:10

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