Think of it not as a photo or a painting, but as a set of instructions. Everything needed to reproduce the design is there, but at no specific size. When you draw your vector art on the computer screen, what's stored is the math behind the drawing, not the drawing itself. In fact, it's not even an image, it's a text file, written in a code called XML, which describes the relationships of all the objects in the design to each other. Blow it up again after shrinking it down, and it looks like a Lego toy, because once you've lost detail, you can't get it back.Ī vector graphic, though, isn't graphical at all - it's mathematical, and it's not even in color. Shrink it down enough, and the fine details get lost.
Blow it up, and the quality gets far worse, because the dots get bigger too. The size of this pattern is fixed, with a set number of dots, or pixels, occupying a set space and relationship to the rest. If you're curious about vector graphics, this is probably not the place for a long explanation but the short one goes like this: bitmap graphics such as JPG and BMP files are made up of numbers that represent a pattern of dots, or pixels. And it's not hard to convert vector graphics into bitmaps, though after that, they become just as inflexible as bitmap files too. Thanks, guys.īTW this is a format which is now read natively by all the major web browsers except (of course) Internet Explorer, but there's a plug-in for that now, too. It's a constant amazement to see what spare-time coders and designers give away for free, and a privilege to be able to use apps like this without having to install bloatware and be charged over the top for it. So don't be put off by the masses of menus and buttons, start drawing basic shapes and just mess around for a while until you're hooked enough on the vector graphic style to want to learn more. If you've done even the smallest amount of drawing with a vector art application, or even just toyed with the pen tool in Photoshop or similar bitmap art and photo apps, there's not much of a learning curve here and you can pretty much dive in and play with it straight away.
Perfect for learning how to use vector graphics, and easily capable of producing professional work if you are, so don't overlook it just because you don't have to spend $400 on it.Īll the basics are here, including bezier curve drawing, manipulating shapes and colors, freehand line drawing and painting and all the basic vector graphic tools. An under-promoted open source alternative to Adobe Illustrator, lacking some of the power tools, but being open source, it's entirely free.
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