What is vector art and what do I do with it?

Jan 5

What is vector art? You want to make a t-shirt, the printer asks you for vector (.pdf or .eps or .ai) art, you give them a 1 inch .jpg or .png of your logo you pull off your website, and they say, X...wrong answer.

So what's the deal? Vector artwork is created in software like Adobe Illustrator and is made up of points instead of pixels (a photo has pixels). It uses math in some mysterious way that I could never begin to explain, because I'm not a math person. But when it is enlarged, or scaled, it is infinitely responsive, and won't lose it's sharpness. Try doing that with a jpg raster file and you will get a pixelated blurry mess most of the time.

This "Carousel of vectors" shows a design and how one piece of vector art:

Can be recolored easily and scaled
Is made up of, sometimes many, dots called points, and curves and lines to form the design.

And that vector file can be printed in different colors, and in this case white, to create this t-shirt design I did for the Madison Marching Band. You can see more designs here.