Story — freelance & agency
Rescuing brand assets when the source files are gone
“The client hired me to redesign their site. When I asked for the logo and icon set, they sent me a hopeful shrug and a login. The agency that built it three years ago was gone, and so were the source files. But the vectors were still right there — living on their own homepage.”
The setup
A redesign that started with a scavenger hunt
What wasn't working
“My first instinct was to screenshot the logo and trace it. That's an hour per mark, and it's never quite right — the curve tension is off, the corners are approximate. For a logo, ‘approximate’ is not acceptable. You can see the difference on the brand's own letterhead.”
Right-click Save image as… got Devin nowhere: the logo was inline <svg>, the feature icons were CSS background-images, and a few were pulled from a sprite. “The browser acted like they weren't images at all. Which, technically, they aren't — they're markup. That's the whole trap.”
The switch
Devin opened the client's live homepage, clicked SVG Downloader, and the popup listed everything on the page. Paging through the isolated previews, the logo was the third item — clean, on its own, off the busy header. A filename, one click, and Saved logo.svg.
“It came down with the xmlns already repaired, so it opened straight into Figma. Full curves, real anchor points, editable. I recoloured a couple that came out black — they were using currentColor, which is normal — and I was designing against the actual brand inside ten minutes.” The feature icons came in the same pass; the CSS-background ones that no save menu would touch were just there in the list.
“I quoted the recovery as a half-day line item out of habit. It took a coffee. I've stopped padding that estimate — and I've stopped tracing logos entirely.”
— Devin Alvarez, freelance web designerThe result
- ~15 iconsplus logo and wordmark recovered as true, editable vector
- 10 minfrom “where are the source files?” to designing against the real brand
- No tracingoriginal curves and anchor points, not a hand-approximation
- What did the work
- The universal method — inline, CSS background and sprite sources in one popup — finished with single Download Current saves under named files.
- The black-icon gotcha
- Icons using
currentColorsave with no baked colour and render black. That's the true markup; recolour it in your editor. Details here. - A note on rights
- Recovering a client's own assets for their own redesign is squarely fair use of the tool. It reads what a browser already loaded — respect the brand's ownership when the site isn't yours.
Composite story — an illustrative but representative workflow. The person and client are fictional; the extension's behaviour described here is real. More stories →
Recover the real vector, not a trace
Inline logos, CSS-background icons, sprite marks — off any page you can open, in one click.