Understanding Vector and Raster Graphics

Choosing the right design, the right designer and the right graphics is essential. Selecting the right business, the right platform and the right time is crucial. If you have an artistic hand but don’t know how to write, or you have beautiful voice and you don’t know how to sing, you may have a gift, but a paralyzed one.

You have a website and don’t know what its composition is; you have graphics and don’t know how they are designed; just the lack of this information you may lose your business.

Simple, yet complex, are the pages of your website containing graphics all together in every space. And those very graphics can hamper you, if not properly designed for an impressive deliverance to the customer.

If your site loads slowly in a browser, if your logos are not eye pleasing, if the fonts are not stylish, if the color combination and outline architecture is not smooth, you might be irritating your own costumer rather appealing to them.

Graphic design elements that are in your websites primarily are of two types; Vector and Raster.

Vector graphics is a geometric modeling of images, widely being used in Computer Graphics today. Vector graphics applies geometrical standards i.e., lines, curves, and polygons to represent images, while Raster graphics or a bit-mapped image, which is based on pixels in a grid, and contains information about the colors to be displaced in “bits”. Due to this raster graphics have fixed resolution, thus cannot be resized without losing image quality.

In addition, bitmap images have much large file sizes; however, vector graphics are prepared by many individual objects, and each of them are defined by geometrical data with individual properties allocated to it such as color, fill, and outline. Thus, vector graphics have free resolution and can bring high quality output at any scale.

Vector images are more flexible than bitmaps, and for that reason they can be resized and stretched. Additionally, images stored as vectors enhance appearances on monitors and printers with higher resolution, while bit-mapped images always appear the same, in spite of of a device’s resolution. Another advantage of vector graphics is it requires less memory than bit-mapped images do.

The word vector graphics is typically used in the context of two-dimensional computer graphics. Today almost all computer video displays transform vector representations of an image to a raster format.

Vector graphics editors usually allow a user to spin, shift, mirror, stretch, tilt, a combination of primitives into a more sophisticated objects. Vector graphics are better for designing outlines, typography, logos, technical illustrations, diagram and flowchart, while bitmap editors are more suitable for retouching photos, photo processing, and artistic illustrations.

It is ideally good for simple or complex drawings that need to be photo-realism. i.e., for PostScript and PDF page description languages use a vector graphics model.

Vector graphic are perfect format for the Web as these are lightweight graphics to the websites due to its file size and problem free regarding physical height and width of the image.

These days, websites are filled with sophisticated icons, images, navigation bars, photographs, bottoms, logos, etc and for cutting the file size, vector graphics are efficient, smaller, compact, and scale perfect or independent resolution compare to the raster graphics.

Regarding programs, which allows us to create and operate vector graphics, are called drawing programs, while programs that operate bit-mapped images are called paint or image editing programs.

Almost all graphics application these days, including CADD systems and animation software, use vector graphics; furthermore, printers like PostScript printers use vector graphics and fonts represent as vectors are called postscript fonts. While, dot-matrix printers, laser printers, and monitors, are raster devices, this means that all objects, even vector objects, must be translated into bit maps before being output which means, even vector graphic images must be interpreted to the raster graphic before the end product can be displayed on paper.

Interesting, yet most important note regarding these two graphics are, its similarity with the human organ behaviors; like bitmap images, the human eyes catches objects in a mosaic raster format by photon recipient nerves though physical world.

Another hand brain function perceives the objects as vector graphics in its visual world. As a result, the brain can easily recalls drawings like cartoons, logos, signs, images, symbols, banners, with outlines. Though the pixel image with mosaic format will be faded out, but the impression of outlines of the pictures will remain in the memory of a human being for long. Eyes cannot manipulate the objects seen in the outer world, it perceives as it is, while the mind can manipulate through its imagination in its mental zone.

If you have chosen the right graphics and the right graphic designer for your business, enrich your business with graphics that are web friendly, swift loading, attractive, impressive and much more than outlines that remain in the mind of your visitor for a very long time.

Your website design should be eye pleasing, mind snatching, impressive and overall appealing to the customers. Design simple, but yet make it striking!

by Bharat Bista