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How to Explain the Difference of Raster and Vector

Thank you everyone for giving me tips and what not, now to print all this out and start working on this since I have to teach about 30 people. I need to be ready for this since they whip me out questions like, "Well cant you make it high res EPS?" "I thought as a designer you can make low res images into High res?" Alot of ignorant comments and the lack of understanding my job role.
 
Vector Vs Raster

THIS IS PERFECT ... THANKS Mark. :D

The best explanation I have found to work on non-artistic types is with graph paper:

First put a point at the center to mark the vertex, then draw four equidistant points, like at 5,0; 0,5; -5,0; and 0,-5. Take a compass and draw the circle connecting those points. Tell them, "this is vector."

Then, try and create a circle by filling in squares with a pen or pencil, but only color in whole squares, so that you get jagged edges. Say, "this is bitmap." With bitmap, you are limited by squares. You'll never get a perfect curve, and if you try and enlarge this, you'll just enlarge the squares you already have. You can't make new, sharper squares when the only information you have is what is given at the current scale.

Mark
 
As a designer for many shops, the duty is usually take what the client sends & make it into something you can use. Most clients send what they have, and many times it's from their web site.
Like it or not, "Educating co-workers, especially Salespeople, wont do anything but waste your time & frustrate you as they will still take whatever the client sends anyway.
Designers jobs are usually to take whatever has been sent & "make it work"
I.E. Take the raster 72dpi, 1"x 2" "Logo" and trace it. That's Your Job sometimes, get used to it.
Having a meeting with them will help them understand that they must account & charge more if it's to be traced, but I doubt it will have the desired effect of having the Sales staff press the offenders for finished Vector art on their end.
The sales staff will likely just tell them they prefer Vector, and try to remember why, all while accepting whatever the client has handy, (see raster 72dpi, 1"x 2" "Logo").
Good luck, but don't expect much to actually change, and get used to tracing bad logos, as that's part of any designers job in the corporate, production world.
 
I love when people import a jpg into Illustrator, save as an ai file and swear to you that it is vector. Or even better, they just change the extension. Like that will magically convert it to a native ai file.

Amazing how many companies only have their logo in jpg or gif format. Redrawing logos is how I have earned extra money and became very good with the pen tool.

If it's a well known company, many logos can be found in vector format at http://brandsoftheworld.com
 
I Got It!

Okay, you take a fuzzy picture of a leopard, and label it "High-Res jpg". Then, you type under that, "Call it what you want, but it can't change it's spots."

Sweet.

Then, you can have a clear graphic of a mobius strip or an infinity symbol, and label it "No-Res eps".

What do you think?
 
I just say "I'll have to redraw it" instead of "Let me convert it to EPS"

Which is true, I try to stick to non-digital words as much as possible. If people imagine you with a pencil drawing something then it reads different than pressing a jpeg to eps button :p
 
kitki83 said:
"Well cant you make it high res EPS?" "I thought as a designer you can make low res images into High res?" Alot of ignorant comments and the lack of understanding my job role.
Click to expand...

Which you can do, by retracing, generating curves, etc. It's just not a magic one step process. Hours of work.

I think of it like a recipe. If I give you a recipe that yields a dozen chocolate chip cookies, and ask you to scale up into a recipe for 4 dozen cookies, that's easy. If I give you a recipe and ask you to convert it into actual cookies, that's easy too. But you can't take a dozen cookies and convert them into 4 dozen cookies (not without making a mess, anyway) and I can't give you a dozen cookies and ask you to convert them into a cookie recipe.
 
Well not everyone has the time to redraw the logo, I had redrawn the logo but when you are crunch in time. Either way its part of the package of design. And my favorite vectorizing website is down that hard.

anyway posted my situation in this website its good therapy for those days

www.clientcopia.com
 
MarksEvilTwin said:
The best explanation I have found to work on non-artistic types is with graph paper:

First put a point at the center to mark the vertex, then draw four equidistant points, like at 5,0; 0,5; -5,0; and 0,-5. Take a compass and draw the circle connecting those points. Tell them, "this is vector."

Then, try and create a circle by filling in squares with a pen or pencil, but only color in whole squares, so that you get jagged edges. Say, "this is bitmap." With bitmap, you are limited by squares. You'll never get a perfect curve, and if you try and enlarge this, you'll just enlarge the squares you already have. You can't make new, sharper squares when the only information you have is what is given at the current scale.

Mark
Click to expand...

Win. Perfect explanation.

EDIT: I do freelance work for a company in my area that makes medical cabinetry. It's funny that this came up, because my latest project is to add some text to a logo for one of their product lines. I got the file I need to modify in my email today. It's an EPS. So far, so good. I open it in Illustrator, and I find that the logo they sent me is a raster graphic placed in an EPS file. Luckily, it's a very simplistic logo, so it won't be too hard just to trace over it. I hope it doesn't happen again, though.
 
Id send out an all hands on deck email explaining it to people. (I have to do this often because when our buildings power goes out people come crying to my office that their computer or printer wont turn on. Yes, people are THAT stupid).
 
I haven't used it extensively, but http://vectormagic.com/ has done a good job on the tasks I've had. Unfortunately, it seems you have to pay for their services now. I guess they realized they have a good thing.
 
dopey220 said:
Win. Perfect explanation.

EDIT: I do freelance work for a company in my area that makes medical cabinetry. It's funny that this came up, because my latest project is to add some text to a logo for one of their product lines. I got the file I need to modify in my email today. It's an EPS. So far, so good. I open it in Illustrator, and I find that the logo they sent me is a raster graphic placed in an EPS file. Luckily, it's a very simplistic logo, so it won't be too hard just to trace over it. I hope it doesn't happen again, though.
Click to expand...

It is a very good explanation, but perhaps these non-design-minded people are non-mathematically-minded too... If that's the case it's probably better to go down the lines of the example stoid gave and LethalWolfe expanded on.

But I'd go a step further...

Take a photo and then hand-trace a version of it in Illustrator. Show your clients these two images at e.g. 100% and 500%. They may prefer the photo at 100% as the vector looks like it's just had a 'Posterize' filter added to it. At 500% they'll see the blockiness of the photo and the sharpness of the vector, and hopefully appreciate the fundamental difference (in practical application terms) of the two formats.

Make it clear the photo is a 'raster' image and the Illustrator one is a 'vector'. Make it clear JPG is raster-only and EPS is vector-only. Tell them that you took a JPG/raster photo and then hand-traced it to make the EPS/vector — and that that's what you'll have to do if they want a large, high-quality EPS but give you a small low-quality JPG.

Using everyday things they're familiar with rather than trying to be too technical is akin to how you'd teach a child something, but it would work to your purpose.
 
You can do what I did and spend a little time creating a style guide that explains it all. The difference between vector and bitmaps, the processes and limitations on conversions etc.

Of course some people still dont get it and they will always be lost. So after the second or third time I just tell them NO ;)

I constantly had a bunch of marketing people at a "large sports network" that would come to me over and over again with jpgs and ask me if i could give them a higher resolution back...
 
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