Guide · 5 min read · updated September 2026
Brand source folders have a way of leaving with the agency. What stays behind is the guidelines PDF — the one document every marketing team has, because it was sent to everyone. It turns out to be a decent archive of the brand, if you know what's actually inside it and what isn't.
What survives in the PDF
A guidelines document exported from InDesign carries far more than a picture of each page:
- Logos. Placed as vector artwork on the logo pages, they are still vector paths inside the PDF. They can be extracted as SVG, not traced — the exact curves, not an approximation.
- Colours. Every swatch on the palette page is a filled rectangle with an exact colour value. Reading those values gives you the palette as it was actually specified, which is more reliable than eyeballing the printed hex codes (which have a habit of disagreeing with the swatch next to them).
- Photography and illustration. Placed images are embedded at whatever resolution they were exported at — often full print resolution in a guidelines file, since nobody downsampled it.
- Type. The names of every font used are recorded in the file, with which weights appear where. That is an inventory, not the font files themselves — see below.
What never comes back
- Font files. A PDF subsets and embeds glyph outlines for the characters it uses, under licence terms that don't permit extracting them as a working font. The extractor tells you which fonts to buy or find; it doesn't hand you the TTFs. If the wordmark uses custom lettering rather than a licensed face, rebuilding it as a font is a separate job.
- The layered logo file. You get the logo as clean vector paths, but not the original Illustrator layers, named artboards or alternate lockups unless each one appears on a page.
- Anything that was already a picture. If the agency placed the logo as a PNG rather than vector, it's a PNG in the PDF too, and the extractor gives you the image, not paths. The preview shows which is which before you pay.
Logos in a guidelines PDF are usually still vectors. Extract them; don't trace them. Tracing is for when there's no vector left anywhere.
The process
- Use the best copy you have. The high-resolution or print PDF beats the "email version"; the latter will have downsampled the photography to 72 dpi.
- Upload it to the brand-asset extractor. The free preview lists what it found: how many images, vector graphics, palette colours and fonts.
- Read the preview like an inventory. A healthy guidelines file shows a handful of vector graphics (the logo variants), a palette of five to twelve colours, and a short font list. Zero vector graphics means the logos were placed as images — still usable, just not scalable.
- Download the pack. Images land as files, vector logos as SVG where they were vectors, the palette as a list of exact values, and the font inventory as names and weights.
- Rebuild the folder structure yourself. The pack is raw material. Name the logo files by their usage, delete the decorative vectors you don't need, and set the palette up as swatches in whatever tool the team uses.
Two things to check afterwards
Colour space. A print guidelines PDF is often CMYK. The extracted values are converted to RGB for screen use; if the brand has a specific Pantone or CMYK build, take that from the printed specification on the page, which is what the printer will use anyway.
Logo clear space and minimum size. These rules are diagrams in the PDF, not data. They survive as pictures of rules. Write them down somewhere the next person will find them, which is the whole reason the source folder went missing in the first place.
When the guidelines PDF is itself a scan
Occasionally the only copy is a scan of a printed book. Then there is nothing to extract — the logo is a photograph of a logo. The recovery path is: trace the logo from the largest, cleanest page (how to get a usable SVG), read the colour values off the printed specification, and rebuild the palette by hand.
The short version
- A guidelines PDF exported from a design app still contains the logos as vectors, the palette as exact values, full-resolution images and the font names.
- It does not contain font files or the layered originals. Expect an inventory of type, not a type folder.
- Extract logos rather than tracing them, and use the print PDF, not the email one.
- The preview lists what was found before you pay; zero vector graphics tells you the logos were placed as images.