Every professional needs to make a choice at some point in their career. Sometimes, this is a major branching point that will shape their future. A writer may need to decide whether they would rather pursue their dream of writing historical fantasy novels or take a full time job writing dense amounts of technical material. An aspiring lawyer is forced to choose what branch of law they will specialize in and the sort of people they will represent in court. Someone who is interested in political activism must commit to either running for public office or remaining with less visible organizations. These are all decisions that seriously impact the trajectory of a professional’s life. However, there are smaller and more subtle choices that must also be dealt with. If someone has decided that they intend to focus on a graphic design career, it may seem as though they’ve figured everything out. Despite this, there will be many small branching points along the road to success that require a choice to be made. An example of one of these less significant (but still important) decisions is whether a graphic designer should specialize in software that creates raster or vector graphics. In today’s business world, there is room for both the professional with a narrow focus of expertise and the designer who can tackle many different tasks. Which path will you end up choosing? Graphic design training will help you understand the fundamental skills you need to succeed with either choice. Before you make a decision, we run over the pros and cons of either approach, and look at how either skillset translates into tangible benefits for your career.
Jack of All Trades: How Photoshop Uses Raster Layers to Stunning Effect
Chances are, most of the digital artwork you’ve seen online was created with raster graphics. When you upload a photograph from your digital camera, the resulting file is a raster image. Digital publications and websites will have raster images liberally peppered amongst articles and lists. Designers who specialize in raster graphics take jobs centered around digitally painting concept art, character art, or storyboarding. They are also the minds behind album cover designs, comic strips and cartoons, and the illustrations used in magazines or newspapers. When raster images are seemingly everywhere, it’s no surprise that many young designers are enrolling in Adobe Photoshop training. The principles of design taught in graphic design training allow someone to excel with raster graphics. This digital painting piece from artist Kyle Lambert is an excellent example of how the sky’s the limit when it comes to raster graphics, even when creating life-like faces or fantastic settings.
What Are the Limitations of Raster Layers?
The saying “a jack of all trades, master of none” comes to mind when discussing raster images. Once a piece of artwork or design has been produced, it can be extremely difficult to adapt or redesign. Raster graphics are made up of a rectangular grid of pixels. The artist sets their canvas size and resolution, and then uses a program to simulate brush strokes or sweeps of colour across this grid. Whenever you try to resize the image, every pixel stubbornly sticks to its place in the grid. This means that a previously beautiful image can turn into a pixellated, amateurish looking blur. Attempting to change the proportions of the image can have similarly disastrous results. There are measures that a designer can take to minimize this damage, such as setting a very high ppi (pixels per inch) for the image, but this is not a total solution.
Master of One: How Clever Use of Vectors Creates Clear and Striking Art
While raster graphics are used in many different circumstances, the issues with resizing or adapting means that they cannot solve every issue. Graphic design training can give you the skills to create a beautiful logo or icon, but you can still face technical limitations in adapting it. Think of some images that must undergo being shrunk down, enlarged, or resized on a regular basis: icons, logos, technical diagrams, and some elements of web design. 
If you are planning to specialize in these fields, then Illustrator tutorials can help you get off to a running start. Illustrator uses vector graphics, which rely on mathematical formulas. Every brush stroke or line follows the formula and is not tied to a grid. This means that vector graphics can be resized freely with no loss in quality. If you need an image to fit on a business card or a billboard, then vectors are the way to go. The file sizes of the images are also miniscule in comparison to their raster siblings, freeing up a huge amount of hard drive space for a designer.
Why is the Use of Vectors So Limited?
With their small file size and enormous amount of adaptability, you may wonder why vector graphics don’t rule the design world. One of the skills you learn in graphic design training is creating visual art that effectively communicates an idea. Unfortunately, vector graphics can be limited in what they can express. For instance, it is relatively simple to create a lifelike representation of a human eye via digital painting with raster layers. However, doing the same thing with vector art is far more difficult. When creating a simplistic cartoony representation or an icon that can be recognized as an eye when viewed from a distance, it is simple to see the strengths of vectors. However, when attempting more ambitious or realistic projects, rasters tend to prevail as a more reliable choice.
Taking graphic design training for a foundation in art is a great idea, but eventually you will want to specialize down one path or another. Vector and raster graphics each have pros and cons for the graphic designer. Taking the time to pick up vector skills through Illustrator tutorials can open up the doors to many commercial design jobs, while Adobe Photoshop training allows a designer to be more versatile and flexible. At Last Minute Training, we offer multiple courses that can help you refine either skillset. Browse our course selection today, or call us at 1-877-313-8881 to speak with a training agent for more information!
