Being in the corporate promotional supply industry you no doubt know that vectors are important formats in the branding process.

But if you’ve never worked with a vector before and are not a graphic designer, you have no doubt asked yourself, what is vector art? To fully understand how it works we need to take a look at another type of artwork called bitmap.

Bitmap images (aka rasters) can be thought of as digital paintings or photos or just about anything that we could see on the Internet. These pictures consist of numerous tiny pixels which are little squares and are the smallest points defining a visual content and its resolution. If there are lots of pixels in a photo, it is considered high resolution and can be printed in large format without losing definition.

However, the less pixels in your image, the more blurry the image becomes. If you try to zoom in rasters, you’re going to see square dots and that’s where quality of the image gets ruined. If you zoom out, then you don’t really see them vividly. This happens because bitmaps are made out of pixels.

Meanwhile, vectors are composed of lines and anchor points, also known as vertices or beziers. If we take a look at how that works, we will see little blue nodes join a segment of a line to another forming shapes with various curves.

Nodes can be flexibly moved around making drawn objects fully and easily editable. And since vectors are not created out of pixels there’s basically unlimited resolution. This enables us to stretch vectors as big as we want with no loss of quality.

Mostly vector art is simple shapes and strokes with colors. It’s not anything that would compare to a digital painting that you could do in Photoshop or Corel Photopaint. However, you still can do advanced graphic designs.

Vectorized pictures are good for creating professional looking logos, maps, drawings, sketches, cartoons as their versatile function allows to enlarge and reduce artworks easily and manipulate the outlines and forms.

If you have a file and are not sure whether it is a vector or a bitmap, feel free to email it to our team at Vectorfox and we will advise you on the content of your file. You can trust us to be honest in advising whether your file is vectorised or not.

To make understanding the difference between vectors and bitmaps a little easier to understand, we’ve concocted this very simple table called The Skinny on Vectors which you are welcome to download.