How to Backwards Engineer a Logo

I spent some time yesterday afternoon backwards engineering a logo for my husband. He wants to have t-shirts made for the Heating and Air Conditioning company he works for, and the example I had to work with was too small to send in as is -- it's on a business card.

I tried scanning it and then auto-tracing in Illustrator, but the result wasn't clean. To do it right there were, basically, 3 things I needed to know. Thought you might like to know them too.

1. How to identify an unknown font: A good start for this project was to identify the font for "All-County." Well, joy, My Fonts now has something called What the Font; I just uploaded my scan of the logo and it identified the font for me. (And, I already had the font on my computer. Hooray!) I did the same for the Heating and Air Conditioning text.

2. How to make the 3-d type: It's done in Illustrator and it's not too hard once it's explained well. I liked this how-to video from Letterhead Fonts (Just checked and wow. They have a cool looking website).

3. How to recreate the clip art: The sun and building, for this project. I learned this sort of thing in Illustrator 101 from Nicole's classes. I think there's a back-to-school discount at the moment. In addition to their online and on-site coursework, they recently started a blog with lots of (free) short tutorials, plus cute freebie printables.

So that's all I needed to know to help my husband. The final product is a PDF, and can be scaled as large as you like without any loss of quality. Great for t-shirts, the side of a truck, anything!

P.S. It's our anniversary tomorrow. I think we are going to a nice restaurant. Yay!