Raster Logos – A Recipe for Disaster

By Nehlsen Staff 7.25.09

A frequent design issue, when dealing with printed pieces, is that of pixelated artwork -- most commonly, a client’s logo. Providing your designer with the proper files can save everybody time and money. I have found that cakes make a good analogy for print problems.

Let's say you have a cake. If you take the cake to a good enough baker he could taste the cake, probably figure out the ingredients, and bake you a cake identical (or close) to the one you originally gave him. It would be very time-consuming, but it could be done. However, if you took the baker the original recipe, he could bake your cake without even breaking a sweat.

In the print world, supplying your designer with a vector EPS file is a lot like giving your baker a recipe. This is because vector artwork is based on mathematical equations, using basic points, lines and curves. This makes vector graphics infinitely scalable, unlike raster images (jpg, gif, tiff), which pixelate when enlarged or magnified (see illustration below).

When a designer is given a logo in one of these raster formats, it must be recreated before it can be scaled without losing image quality. This, like baking a cake from taste, is a very time-consuming process, one that could potentially end up costing you a lot of money.

EPS Illustration