Must Be Art Weblog

I found out today that there is an official canonical version of the AMSAT logo, and it’s pretty different from the one I’ve been using on the AMSAT web site. Unfortunately, the official artwork dates from 1969, so there’s only a hard copy, and scans from it look rather ragged by modern standards. So, I took this as an opportunity to improve my modest skills with Adobe Illustrator. I created a smooth resolution-independent version that more or less matches the official artwork.

I learned a lot. Mainly, that it’s hard to make an exact match for something hand-drawn. Even though I had the name of the font used, the text doesn’t quite match exactly. I wasted a few hours on this, and could easily have wasted a few more trying to get the match more exactly.

Check out this before-and-after animation, showing the scanned original and the reproduced Illustrator artwork alternately. This is a brutal way to make the comparison; even trivial differences jump out at you.