What "flat" means to the tracer

A flat logo has a handful of solid colours and clean edges: a wordmark, a badge, an icon with two or three fills. This is the input the tracer handles best, because its first step is to reduce the picture to a small set of colours and its second step is to outline each colour as a shape. When the source already is a few solid colours, both steps have very little to guess.

The four controls

Preset. Standard starts at up to 8 colours and suits most logos, icons and stickers. Cricut / Vinyl prepares a file for a cutting machine: it starts at 4 colours with Remove background on, and merges lines, gaps and specks too thin to cut or weed into their neighbour — so thin outlines and small text fill in or disappear (more in the cutting guide). Line art / Stencil throws colour away entirely and traces black ink on white paper — useful for stamps and stencils, wrong for a coloured logo. Detailed artwork starts at 16 colours and otherwise works like Standard, keeping slightly smaller specks. Every preset except Line art runs the same palette clean-up first.

Colors, up to (2–24). A ceiling, not a target: the tracer picks up to this many colours from the solid areas of the image (soft edges don't count), and every shape in those colours becomes a path, so a sticker with five designed tones comes back with five fills whether you ask for 8 or 16. Count the colours you can see, add one for the background if it is not transparent, and start there; the default of 8 covers most logos and stickers. Too few and two similar fills merge into one shape; past 12, flat artwork gains nothing.

Smooth curves. On, every edge becomes a smooth curve: a corner stays sharp where the outline turns sharply, and long straight runs stay straight. It simplifies outlines; it does not remove speckle (the palette clean-up does that, with either setting). Off, the outline follows the pixel grid exactly, so every pixel step stays a step — right for pixel art or deliberately jagged shapes and wrong for almost everything else.

Remove background. On, the tracer finds the one or two colours that each cover at least 15 % of the image border and makes them transparent, working inward from the edges, together with close shades, the soft fringe where the backdrop meets the artwork, and small specks along the image edge. It never removes enclosed areas, so the white inside a letter or a badge survives. Leave it off for logos that already have a transparent background, and for logos whose background colour also appears inside the artwork touching the edge.

A working recipe

  1. Upload the largest, sharpest version of the logo you have, up to 2048 pixels on the long side (larger images are scaled down to that before tracing). A 2000-pixel PNG traces far better than a 300-pixel one; tracing does not invent detail.
  2. Keep the Standard preset. Set colours to what you count (a two-colour wordmark on white: 3).
  3. Leave Smooth curves on.
  4. Turn on Remove background if the logo sits on a solid backdrop you do not want as a shape.
  5. Convert and zoom into the preview. Look at: the corners of letters (should be crisp, not rounded off), the thinnest strokes (should be continuous) and the palette strip (should list the colours you expected and nothing extra).
  6. If a colour is missing, raise the count by one and convert again. If the palette shows two near-identical shades of one colour, lower it by one.

Previews are free, so iterating costs nothing but time; unlock only the version you keep.

When the result still looks wrong

  • Rounded corners on a geometric logo. A very blunt or very small corner can come out slightly rounded. Upload a larger source, or turn Smooth curves off for that image to keep the exact pixel outline.
  • Thin outline turned into a series of blobs. The stroke is only a pixel or two wide at the source resolution. Upload a larger original; there is no setting that restores it.
  • Background removed the inside of the letters too. That means the inside is connected to the edge somewhere (a broken outline). Turn removal off and delete the background path in the editor instead, or repair the outline in the source.
  • A gradient in the logo became stripes. Expected; see the guide on why photos and gradients posterise.