Here’s another great issue that I’d love to shed some light on if you don’t already know the difference. On the Ollibird/Loveland team, Mike is the Photoshop expert. I am the Illustrator expert. And while people know what Photoshop is and what it does, I find that they’re generally less familiar with Illustrator and why it’s used. The primary difference comes down to raster vs. vector.

Photoshop is a program that uses raster graphics, meaning the image is made of of a series of pixels. If you scale an image smaller than the original, you’re okay. If you try to scale it larger, you’re toast. The pixels just get bigger.

Illustrator on the other hand is a program that uses vector graphics, meaning the image is made up of mathematically-controlled anchor points and curves. What that means to you is that the image you create is infinitely scalable.

Why is that important, you ask? Well, take this pink pug for example. Look at this tiny little pink pug:

Now, look at the difference if I increase the size of the pug. One of these pugs is vector. The other is raster. Can you tell which is which?

The vector pug is able to scale up with no loss of clarity. Hooray!!

So let’s say that the pink pug is your logo for your brand new business, Pink Pug Prosthetics. And let’s say that you pay a Photoshop-dependent and Illustrator-inept designer to create your logo. You want your logo to appear on your webpage at 220px wide and you want it to appear on your business cards, which are only 3.5″ x 2″. So your designer creates a perfect pink pug that is appropriate for both those sizes. Great! But what happens next year when Pink Pug Prosthetics takes off as a business and you need to have a huge sign printed for your trade show booth? The only way to size that up in Photoshop (and still make it look good) would be to create the whole thing over again from scratch. I’m sorry.

If your logo had been created in Illustrator, though, the pink pug could be easily scaled up to whatever size you need it to be. Yay vector!

A few important things to note however:

Photos are never vector. They are always raster. You can’t just drop a photo (or any rasterized) image into Illustrator and expect it to magically become a vector image.

Vector images must be created in a program that supports vector graphics (like CorelDraw or Illustrator).

As soon vector graphics are exported to different file formats (such as jpg, png, etc.) they become raster graphics. (Hence, if you download my magical pink pug from this post, you’ll be disappointed to discover that it is made up of pixels, not anchor points and curves.) But you keep the Illustrator file as a source file for when you need to size up or down. (Does that make sense?)

There are times when working with raster graphics is best and times when working with vector graphics is best, so I’m not trying to say that one format necessarily wins over the other. If you want more information, here’s an article about vector graphics on wikipedia!