Design Nomenclature / Digital Model Making
Vector
Also called vector graphic, outline graphic, vector art
An image stored as geometry — paths with control points, fills, strokes — evaluated at output time, and so resolution-independent by construction. Not automatically better: gradients, blurs, and photographic detail are expensive or impossible, and complexity costs render time. A font is vector; its appearance on a screen is not.
In practice
“Vector it” means redraw as paths, which is a rebuild, not a conversion. Auto-tracing a raster produces paths; it does not produce vector design.
Not to be confused with
- RasterAn image stored as a grid of samples. It has no notion of what it depicts — a letterform in a raster is not a letter, it is the pixels a letter left behind. Scaling means resampling, and resampling invents data. Cost is fixed by dimensions regardless of content, which is why photographs are raster.
- ResolutionAmbiguous by use. The word names pixel dimensions (4096 by 4096), sampling density (300 ppi), and sometimes an output size in inches — three different quantities, of which any two determine the third. An image has no physical size until a density is chosen, so “high resolution” is not a property of a file.