The Difference Between Vectors and Pixels for Scalable Design
I’m not an adobe user, except for acrobat, and even that I try to keep to a minimum. It’s not that I’m opposed to adobe products, it’s just that they are insanely complicated and make my little brain hurt.
That said, both this site and my new Team Disruption website (coming soon) need logos, and adobe is the industry standard, offering 30 day trial periods to beginners like me so we can make our once-in-a-lifetime logos and then go back to fearing adobe products again (note to adobe: maybe make an amateur version? Or just tell us to use Microsoft paint and come back when we’re serious, idk).
Anywho, I did not realize that there was a difference between designing a logo using pixels (photoshop) versus designing one using vectors (illustrator). I saw a great lynda.com video today though that illustrated the difference.
It comes down to scalability. When an image is designed in photoshop, it is rasterized, meaning that it is defined by pixels. That means that as it gets scaled up into a larger image, it begins to look “hairy.” You’ve probably downloaded an image from the web and stretched it out before; note the little lego-block effect that happens and that’s what I mean.
An image designed using vectors, however, does not have this issue. When the image is resized to something larger, it maintains the same quality. That’s a nice feature, and something I’ll be looking for as I design these sites.
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30daysatatime posted this
