What in the world is "Vector" anyway?

You may have had your printer or promotional products person ask for your logo in a "vector format" when you wanted to get business cards printed, a sign created or t-shirts designed. Or your web designer might have asked you for a "Jpeg" or a "Png" file. You probably said to yourself, "I'm not a designer, I'm a (insert your profession here)! I don't know what a Vector file is! That's what I'm paying YOU for!"

I'm here to tell you, even if YOU – the business owner – can't open it without design programs, the most important version you can have of your logo is the vector file. Hopefully, your designer used this method to create your logo originally, as it is the best way to ensure your logo can be enlarged to any size needed in the future. From this file, a designer can import and export to create pretty much any other file format you may need, whether it's for web, printing on checks, or placement on a giant billboard or the side of a building!

The simplest way to explain it is, a vector image is made of lines, points and curves, which are clean and easily edited and resized without losing clarity. The other type of image, a raster image, is made of  pixels, and loses quality as it is enlarged. Digital photographs are a good example of a raster image.

To give you an example, the following png files were both created in very different ways. The one on the left was designed using vectors, the one on the right, was not. The difference is clear.

At Red Horse Dezign, we are always looking towards the future with your company's best interest in mind. We set you up correctly right from the beginning with a logo, drawn as a vector image, and from that, can convert it into any file format color option, or layout you might need.