by astrosa
Otto,
That's an interesting trick that I'll have to try. I thought of trying that before, but in my experience, I usually have trouble importing PDFs into Illustrator. I do know that when saving a PDF, there is an option for whether or not to preserve its editability in Illustrator. Maybe that partly determines whether it works or not.
But I'm not sure that I'd exactly call this 'providing their artwork for free.' One of the nice things about the PDF format is that you can pretty much take comfort in knowing that most end-users will not be able to edit your file in any way, only to view and print it. What you described is basically reverse engineering - I'm sure the Amtrak artists who created the PDF schedules did not expect people to be able to open them up and extract the artwork for their own use.
It would be different if Amtrak actually provided a 'graphic toolkit' the way many companies do. I've downloaded artwork like that before, and it usually comes in an EPS format as well as several raster formats. The idea is that if people are going to use the logo, they might as well get it right. The toolkit from my school (RPI) includes all the logos, a list of fonts, and some extremely specific instructions for usage and color schemes.
The whole issue here is that Amtrak has been somewhat protective of their new 'wave' logo. If I'm just doing decal artwork for my own use, I don't care, but if I'm providing it to other people in any way, I want to step carefully. I contacted Amtrak's 'Brand Administation' department to see what they'd say, but I haven't gotten a reply yet.
Alex Stroshane
That's an interesting trick that I'll have to try. I thought of trying that before, but in my experience, I usually have trouble importing PDFs into Illustrator. I do know that when saving a PDF, there is an option for whether or not to preserve its editability in Illustrator. Maybe that partly determines whether it works or not.
But I'm not sure that I'd exactly call this 'providing their artwork for free.' One of the nice things about the PDF format is that you can pretty much take comfort in knowing that most end-users will not be able to edit your file in any way, only to view and print it. What you described is basically reverse engineering - I'm sure the Amtrak artists who created the PDF schedules did not expect people to be able to open them up and extract the artwork for their own use.
It would be different if Amtrak actually provided a 'graphic toolkit' the way many companies do. I've downloaded artwork like that before, and it usually comes in an EPS format as well as several raster formats. The idea is that if people are going to use the logo, they might as well get it right. The toolkit from my school (RPI) includes all the logos, a list of fonts, and some extremely specific instructions for usage and color schemes.
The whole issue here is that Amtrak has been somewhat protective of their new 'wave' logo. If I'm just doing decal artwork for my own use, I don't care, but if I'm providing it to other people in any way, I want to step carefully. I contacted Amtrak's 'Brand Administation' department to see what they'd say, but I haven't gotten a reply yet.
Alex Stroshane
