Vector-Based Drawing Tools

Today's illustrators and graphic designers have moved beyond drawing with traditional media of pen and ink to the world of digital media, the most important of which are the various vector-based drawing tools.

Advantages of vector-based drawing tools

Everyone these days is familiar with Adobe Photoshop, and non-professionals might consider this the best and most useful of the graphics programs available to illustrators. Vector-based drawing tools, however, have a huge advantage over pixel-based graphics programs like Photoshop, the advantage of scalability. Blow up a Photoshop based illustration to the size of a giant billboard and the individual pixels that form the image start to show and detail gets lost. Because vector based images use mathematical descriptions to form the lines and shapes, you can print them at any size from a tiny web icon to a billboard on a multi-story building. They are also much easier to edit and recolor than pixel based images, allowing designers to easily form new illustrations and artwork by re-arranging existing graphical elements, thus increasing productivity dramatically.

Available tools for the artist

A vector graphics program contains tools that allow the illustrator to draw in a multitude of styles, creating everything from the straight lines and controlled perspective of technical drawing, to flowing and free water-color style illustrations formed from naturalistic looking brush strokes. While Adobe Illustrator is the best known program, there are alternatives, including Corel Draw and the open-source program Inkscape.

Whichever program an illustrator chooses to use, no professional can afford to ignore learning the skills necessary to produce clean and clear vector-based graphics if he or she wants to remain competitive in the job market.