If you've been a designer for longer than a minute, you've no doubt ran into a situation where you need the client's logo for something you're working on. Do seek out the official logo whenever you can, especially if it's super brand specific, but if it's for something like I'm currently working on (high level wireframes) then by all means, save yourself the time it takes to write the email and bust a vector version for yourself.
Some logos are more complex than others, but a lot of the really good ones are very simple. If you look at them long enough and study the geometry, you can start to see the patterns of how they were created. Circles, squares, diamonds, etc. all shapes that are used in part to create certain types of logos.
Showing concentric circles around a logo design gets a bad rep, but perhaps it's because the critics don't understand how they are used by some designers to create the finished product.
For example, I used 5 circles as the base for my mds logo. See below.
Check out the video below to get a walkthrough of recreating a client logo with simple vector shapes.
Super Secret Logo Trick
You can also do a google search for your client name and pdf to see if any documents with their vector logo exist online. You can check to see if it's vector by looking at the document, zooming in, and seeing if the quality is still sharp.
Once you've found it, download the pdf and open it using Illustrator. You can then use the direct select tool A to cut it out of the document and paste it into a new one. Voila!
See the next post in the series, "How to Create an iPad Wireframe and Mobile Safari Icons"