Logo Design Idea: Turn a photo into a logo

I alway like to keep handy different design ideas before approaching a new logo project. So i thought i'm going to do a series of logo design ideas and post here. The first approach is to use a photography to design a logo element or symbol. This is especially appropriate when in need of a natural element, like a flower, a tree, a fruit or a landscape and has the advantage of giving the final product a sort of natural or wild appearance.

Here are some basic steps. Firstly select an image that has an element that you like. We're going after the central flower element, so keep that in mind for the next steps.


Bring the photo up in Photoshop and turn it greyscale.


Play around with the Brightness / Contrast (Image / Adjustments / Brightness Contrast) a few times until you achieve something like this.


We're looking to extract the flower element in the image so we'll invert the photo (Image / Adjustments / Invert) and then open it in Illustrator.


Illustrator has a very nice tracing tool so go ahead a play around with this to obtain different effects. I've chosen the simple trace in this case and here is the result.


Remove the unnecessary elements and we've got our flower element nicely vectored.


Our logo will be called Phlower (Photo-Flower), so i found this font and used the P letter to enhance our flower element by adding it as a leaf.


Add the text in a grunge type of font and position the elements.


Add some color and there we have our simple but effective logo design element.


Now of course, you can further tweak, enhance or play with this, but mainly i think that this logo design idea has proven itself as being viable.