Vector vs raster images: why your logo must be a vector file

First published in October 2016 under the title "What is vector?", revised in 2026. The question hasn't aged a day: people still ask me why a logo sent as a JPEG causes trouble at the printer's, and why I keep insisting on "vector files". Here is the updated version.

Two ways to describe an image

A raster image is a grid of coloured dots, a matrix, which is where its other name comes from. The file essentially says: "row 34, column 58, colour red", and it repeats that for every one of the millions of pixels. This is the format of your photos: JPEG, PNG, and today WebP or AVIF.

A vector image stores no dots. It stores a recipe: "S-shaped arc, colour red". Shapes, curves, fills, that the machine recalculates every time it is displayed. Three direct consequences:

• you can resize it with no loss of quality at all,
• you can edit it easily, changing a colour is just changing one instruction,
• you can manipulate it on the fly, including inside a web page.

The zoom test

Zoom hard into a photo: the mosaic of pixels shows up, the edges turn into staircases. Zoom into a vector file: the machine recalculates the curves and everything stays sharp, at 200% as much as at 10,000%.

A subtlety I was already explaining in 2016, and which still holds: at the end of the chain, your screen is always a grid of pixels. A vector logo shown in a 16-pixel-wide area will have slightly soft rounded corners. It isn't the file that's at fault, it's the display area that lacks pixels, whether the limit is software-based (the image is shown too small) or physical (the screen or the printing surface is too small).

"My vector image is pixelated": the only two causes

This was the most common question back then, and I still see only two possible explanations:

1. The file isn't really vectorised. Being saved as .ai, .eps, .pdf or .svg is not enough. You can quite easily paste a photo into an Illustrator document: the extension is vector, the content is not. If that is your case, raise it with your designer.
2. The display area lacks pixels, as explained above.

Why you don't vectorise a photograph

You can technically assign vectors to any image, but you can't fully vectorise a photo with a faithful result. A photo lives on its gradients, its textures, its complex shapes. Turned into vectors, it will no longer show pixels when enlarged, but a watercolour effect, flat areas overlapping where there used to be substance.

Vector graphics excel on their own ground: geometric shapes, bold colours, clean edges. In other words logos, icons, illustrations, diagrams.

What has changed since 2016: SVG has won the web

Back in 2016 I was already embedding SVGs animated on hover straight into this post, which was still a little exotic. Ten years later, SVG has become the standard format for logos and icons on the web, and for good reasons: a tiny file, perfect sharpness on every screen even as pixel densities have exploded, and the ability to style it in CSS and animate it without any extra image.

On the raster side, the progress is elsewhere: AVIF and WebP compress photos far better than JPEG. So the split of roles has become very simple, and it is the rule I apply:

• photos and rich visuals: raster, in AVIF or WebP,
• logos, icons, illustrations: vector, in SVG.

Neither format is "better". Each one is bad on the other's ground.

When I deliver a logo, it always ships as vector

This is where theory meets the craft. When I create a visual identity, the logo is built in vector from the very first stroke and delivered in vector, never only as a PNG. In my graphic design package, the logo and the essential brand start at €900 with the logo, its variations, the palette and the typography, and the transfer of rights is included.

These two points, vector files and transfer of rights, protect the client in the same way: they make them self-sufficient.

With the source vector file, your logo exports at any size and in any current raster format: a 16-pixel favicon, a business card, a building-front banner, the same file serves everywhere and stays sharp everywhere. You will never have to contact me in a panic because the printer is demanding "the high-resolution file".

With the transfer of rights, you own your identity, you don't rent it. You can evolve it, hand it to someone else, adapt it, without depending on its author.

If your current logo only exists as a JPEG dug out of an old email attachment, that is a fixable problem. Let's talk.