Blog PostThe World’s first 2D Artwork Extractor is now available on Spring

Sourceful Research is pleased to announce that our breakthrough technology, Artwork Extractor, is now available to all users on Spring, the AI toolkit for packaging designers. The idea behind Artwork Extractor is very simple: take a photograph or image of packaging, and extract the 2D vector artwork from it.

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How it works

Designers can take images they’ve generated using Spring’s AI generator or upload photographs or images of packaging from any source. Using the Extractor, they choose a vector format (SVG, EPS, PDF, DXF – Adobe Illustrator compatible) and then run the extractor.

Behind the scenes, we construct a generative world model that simulates the artwork being constructed in 2D before it is applied into the 3D environment of the photograph. This world model understands curves, shadows, angles, reflection, occlusion, transparency, and product type.

From this, we can then create a clean flat 2D artwork and vectorise it to the designer’s preferred format, so they can bring it into Adobe Illustrator, Penpot, Figma, or whichever vector/graphics tool they want to use as a next step.

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The ability to extract artwork from any static image and translate it into an editable art file in under a minute is a huge timesaver—and it lets me dive right into my creative process. With AI becoming more prevalent for designers and brands, Spring's ever-expanding toolkit actually makes it useful. It's streamlined, intuitive, and seamlessly fits into my workflow. Very impressed.

Lauren Carragher
Freelance Graphic Designer

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The research breakthrough

At Sourceful, we research AI technology that connects concept to physical manufacturing, and everything in between. From hundreds of designers, we heard consistently that a key challenge when working with AI generated images was having to bring it back from the conceptual 3D image into the technically precise world of 2D vector artworking. Even taking a photo and redrawing it in 2D can take hours. It’s not a creative exercise, as you are effectively tracing, but it is time consuming and up until today, very manual.

With the Artwork Extractor, this first step happens in under 60 seconds, letting you get into your vector tool of choice to begin shaping it to your exact needs.

Our breakthrough came from studying, through screen recordings, how designers do this multi-hour manual task. This involves first modifying the photograph to try and rotate and flatten, and then tracing each individual shape and pattern to recreate it without shadows, lighting, and all the other real world impacts a photo has. We noticed that even though it takes humans thousands of keystrokes, mouse movements, and a lot of patience, it was a reproducible action. Two designers working on this task would end up with very similar results. That’s a very different type of action to concept creation, where two designers would definitely get something unique each time.

As a result of this insight, we were able to build a world model that could also achieve the same set of steps, but instead of thousands of individual actions, it could jump straight to the finish line in one go.

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Get started today

1. Explore spring.sourceful.com
2. Try our AI-powered tools in your next project
3. Discover detailed tutorials in our help centre

Our team is ready to help you unlock Spring's full potential.

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Future ideas

At Sourceful Research, we see ourselves as bridge builders. The Artwork Extractor is just one in a very long list of bridges that we are building between concept creation and physical manufacturing. We want to make it easy to go from ideation and shaping to getting the final product into customer’s hands.

If you are interested in the research work we are doing at Spring, we’re happy to collaborate with both technologists and designers to craft this exciting next generation of tools.

Thanks,

Wing

CEO of Sourceful