Most suppliers can tell a story or two about an order that was submitted with the artwork scribbled on a napkin. This may be an exaggerated example, but it’s probably not far from the truth. Good artwork reproduction starts with understanding the artwork requirements and being able to talk intelligently about them with your client.
For Feature Friday, Promotional Consultant Today tells how to identify vector art, as described in Coaches Corner in the April issue of Promotional Consultant digital magazine.
Q: Is this vector art?
Vector graphics are made of lines, points and curves, often called shapes. They are defined by mathematical objects called vectors. They are usually created in a drawing program such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW. Since they’re made up of lines and shapes defined by math, they can be scaled down or up without losing edge definition or quality. The computer simply recalculates the math and redraws the image to whatever size you choose.
A raster art file is a bitmap image. It’s usually created in an image editing or painting program such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel PHOTO-PAINT or Corel Painter. These images are made up of pixels. A photo taken on your digital camera is a raster image.
Unlike vector files, raster artwork is resolution dependent, meaning that if you enlarge an image, it loses detail. The original size of an image is made up of a fixed number of pixels each assigned a color value and location. If you see jagged edges on a printed image, it means that the image doesn’t have enough resolution.
Learn more about converting a raster file by reading the complete article in the April issue of Promotional Consultant digital magazine.
Source: Dane Clement is well-known for his expertise in computer graphics and color separations. He is the president of Great Dane Graphics, vice president of GroupeSTAHL Creative and has authored T-Shirt Artwork Simplified books for Adobe and Corel users.
Here is an example of Vector vs Raster. Zoom in to see differences.
