Where Can Vectors Take You?

Any vectorist will tell you that there is a lot of personal satisfaction in creating vector art. Because it's not the simplest of mediums to work with, most vector artists will take great pleasure in finishing a piece and being proud of their work, even in the beginner stages.  Personally I also find great joy in watching other vector artists complete a piece, knowing how much work went into it.

But what else can vectors do for us?

If you decide to take your vector knowledge and skill into the workplace, there are many avenues and careers that Vector artists can embark upon.

Freelancing Being a Freelance Vector artist can take you in many directions, leaving your possibilities wide open to different opportunities. One week you might find yourself designing a logo or branding elements for a new company. The next week you might be designing a larger than life billboard.  You might set your sights on designing and illustrating children's books or greeting cards.  Being a freelance vector artists allows you to be diverse and seldom bored!  Freelancing does have a down-side as well, in that you have to constantly put yourself out there and find work, especially in the beginning stages. Once you've established yourself a bit and satisfied some clients, more work should come your way. After a while you'll probably find that you've become so busy that you're having to turn down some work just to keep up with the work you decide to take!

Advertising Agencies While vectors are used more and more in the graphics industry, most agencies will need you to know a variety of mediums other than vector, in order to satisfy the wide variety of clients and their needs.  But designers are discovering more often than not, that vectors are the easiest to work with when designing work for a client.  Vectors are able to be edited very quickly in most cases.  Changing a colour of an object or text is much easier in vector than it is in raster work. The size of a vector file is also important, as it's usually very, very small when compared to a raster file.  Extremely complex vector work can be contained in a very small file size!

Signmaking  This is a field that I hold close to my heart, and this is how I earn my living these days. I work for a small but long-established signmaking company. We might be small, but there is almost nothing that we can't do, and we love a good challenge!  My job is to do the vector work for 95% of the signs, business cards, vehicle graphics, embroidery designs, personal property signs, posters, banners...the list is pretty big.  I love my job. It's as diverse as being a freelance artist, but without the headache of having to find my own clients and do my own bookwork   I have found over the past few years of working for signmakers, that vector artists are pretty in-demand, at least around here. I should note here that while Adobe Illustrator is the 'standard' for most vector illustrations, in the signmaking world CorelDRAW is more widely used. I'm not sure of the reason behind this, whether it's that CorelDRAW is more compatible with the vinyl cutters and larger plotting machines than Illustrator is, or if it's because of the add-on tools that can be bought for CorelDRAW such as SignTools, EasySIGN and other similar add-ons that make our jobs much easier. So if you're in the market for a job with a signwriter, you might brush up on some CorelDRAW skills

Web Design Scalable Vector Graphics (or SVG) has been around since 1999. So why is it news today? The answer is inline SVG. Using HTML5, you can code SVG directly in your page, so vectors are being used more often in web design these days! The main reason being that the file size for vector graphics, as stated in the Advertising Agency paragraph above, are SO much smaller than raster files, and therefore LOAD onto webpages at warp speed!

What else? The possibilities of finding work with vector graphics is pretty much limited to your imagination and how much effort you're willing to put into finding the perfect job for you.  The jobs/careers listed above are only a few examples. Vectors are finding their way into fashion illustration, television graphics, mobile applications (such as graphics for that iPhone or Android phone in your pocket), game designs, software creation, animation...the list goes on and on!

What makes vector graphics so popular? The infinite scalability, the clarity and the file size! In each and every profession that works with vector graphics, these are the main reasons they're so popular, and the reason that more and more companies are using them in their design work...and of course they're the reasons WE love vectors so much!!

Until next time...
and
`DomiSM