When marketing your business, imagery can highly engage your customers. In fact, the human brain processes visual content 60,000 times faster than text. And with up to 3 billion images uploaded online everyday, it can be difficult to choose which image types to use when you create a website, logo or email marketing campaign.
Enter: Vector art—images that maintain their quality at any size. Once you’ve created a single vector image file type, you can recolor or resize it for all your marketing assets and web designs without sacrificing quality.
Here’s what you need to know about how to make a website.
What is vector art?
Vector art, also known as vector illustrations or vector images, is made of scalable vector graphic files, or SVGs. This specific image type can be resized or modified without any effect on quality. This scalability is helpful for website imagery: You can use these graphics at any size–from your site’s favicon, to a large, featured image on a landing page, and the quality will stay the same. They provide a one-size-fits-all approach to imagery.
Standard JPEG and PNG images, also known as raster graphics, are composed of pixels. This type of images and graphics can’t reproduce rounded edges without producing jagged lines as you scale the image. But vector art is made with scalable vector graphic files (SVGs) and are made up of standard mathematical graphics and shapes. These files can scale without quality loss or pixelation. This means your business can create a single vector image and reuse it on marketing materials of any size, from bus advertisements to business card logos.
The importance of vector art in modern web design
The first computers, websites and early gaming systems, such as Spasim (launched in 1974), used vector graphics when implementing raster images proved too expensive. However, as website creation evolved, designers needed a new image type that maintained its quality on any screen, at any size. As screen sizes started to vary, responsive web design became important as tech companies sought to provide quality user experiences at scale: Enter vector illustrations.
Tip: Wix launched the Vector Art library in 2018 filled with colorful, dynamic, and adaptable imagery. Today, the product consists of more than 9,000 vector illustrations. It allows users and designers alike to create a single image and customize it for any platform and screen.
Creating your own vector art
Whether you want to create website icons or brand your own marketing materials, you’ll need to learn how to create vector art. But don’t be deterred. Many online tutorials and courses exist to help you create these graphics with special software.
Here are four vector graphic illustration software options:
Inkscape. Inkscape is a free illustration software. The program doesn’t offer the bells and whistles of its paid competitors, but it works well for hobbyists and people new to graphic illustration.
CorelDRAW. Another software that’s good for beginners, CorelDRAW offers users an intuitive experience.
Adobe Illustrator. Adobe is the most common software on the market for both beginners and professionals.
Sketch. This all-in-one design program allows you to easily collaborate with others and offers a great user interface. However, this iOS-only software Sketch must be used with Mac computers or iPads.
How to use vector art
You can use vector art to create your brand’s entire visual language or as part of your website design.
Tip: Both the business card maker and logo maker supply .svg files, so you can design the perfect emblem and personalize your brand with these stylish graphics.
Using vector art on your website
Vector graphics add style and design to websites. They’re a great option because no matter what size screen someone is viewing your website on, your vector art will adjust itself and not become distorted.
Tip: Choose from Wix’s vector graphic library or upload your own via the Wix Editor. Plus, each uploaded SVG file goes through the sanitation engine that prevents malicious code from publishing on your website.