That time a client asked for 'high resolution' and I spent 3 hours recreating a raster logo

Last month, a small business owner from Tampa sent me their logo as a tiny 72 DPI JPEG from their website. They wanted a banner printed at 4 feet wide and said 'just make it higher resolution.' I spent 3 hours tracing that pixelated mess in Illustrator to rebuild it as a vector. Has anyone else had to explain that you can't just 'fix' a low-res image by clicking a button?

3 comments

3 Comments

ivancoleman12h ago

...and a buddy of mine who does graphic work had the same thing happen to him last year. Some real estate agent sent him a screenshot of a logo that was maybe 400 pixels wide and expected a billboard-ready file in an hour. He ended up spending his whole Saturday redrawing the thing from scratch, and the client still asked why it "looked different" from the original blurry mess. It's amazing how people think pixels are just a suggestion you can fix with a single click.

the_leo9h ago

Have you ever looked at a client's reference image and felt your soul leave your body? That 400-pixel logo story hits way too close to home. I once had someone send me a photo of their computer screen taken with a flip phone and thought I could "just enhance it" for their website header. Spent three hours recreating their janky shapes and colors from scratch, only for them to say it "wasn't poppin'" enough. It's like people think we've got some magic Photoshop button labeled "make not crappy.

gonzalez.phoenix4h ago

My buddy who does freelance logos had a client send him a screenshot of a business card that was literally folded and crumpled up. Dude wanted it scanned and "cleaned up" for a digital ad. My friend spent like four hours tracing the damn thing in Illustrator, matching fonts by eye, the whole nine yards. Client gets it back and says "can you make the blue a bit more blue?" Like that was the only problem with the whole ordeal. Still sends me a screenshot of that old crumpled card every time he needs a laugh.