If you’re new to T-shirt design, you may be wondering why Vector formats such as those available on SignSilo, are preferred over Raster or Bitmap ones in the T-shirt design industry. This is exactly what we shall discuss today. We shall look more closely at the advantages of Vectors for T-shirt design.
If you’re completely new to graphic design, you may want to know more about Vectors and Rasters. So let’s deal with this doubt first and get it out of the way, before we discuss some very important aspects of Vectors for T-shirt Design
What are Vectors
So what are these Vectors or Vector graphics anyways? Well, there are mainly two kinds of images – Vectors and Rasters (also called as Bitmaps).
Vectors are created by using Vectors softwares such as Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW or Inkscape. In this format the shapes are created by using a series of dots called anchor points or nodes. So Vector graphics are a created with dots, lines, curves and polygons with colour fills. Anchor points or nodes may be added, removed and moved to modify the shape of the graphics.
Raster shapes are made up of pixels which are small blocks of colour that complete a picture when mapped together. Hence the name Bitmap, where bit refers to the colour and location data and the map refers to the process of putting them together on a 2d plane. Photographs and scanned images fall under this category.
Where can you find great vectors?…
You can see some great vector graphics over on SignSilo that are perfect for T-shirt designs! And right now they are running an unbeatable deal with the SignClub plan, a yearly subscription to access their entire library for only $199. With over 3 MILLION hand-picked vectors, checked manually for quality at your disposal, you're not far away from the graphic you need when you need it! – Take a look for yourself, start a search below and find the perfect vector for your next T-shirt design!
Here are some of the other main benefits of the SignClub subscription:
One year membership, 600 downloads and no limit on your daily or monthly use, for $199
- All of the Vector Graphics on offer are in .EPS format and can be completely customised.
- Full access to a hand-curated library of over 3 million vectors with 10,000+ added every month!
- Fully Integrated Search with Keywords and Tagging
- All of the shapes can be easily resized with no loss in quality.
- All of the illustrations on offer can be used for commercial purposes, for yourself or on behalf of a client.
- They can also be used on their own or as part of a larger project.
- Royalty Free License included with every vector graphic!
- Access millions of stock photos, fonts, wrap artwork and more at no added cost
Check out what SignSilo has to offer you and pick up your SignClub plan here!
Now that you know the difference between Vectors and Bitmaps, we can explore further why Vectors for T-shirt Design.
List of Advantages of Vectors for T-shirt Design
Read on to discover what makes Vectors the preferred format for T-shirt Design
1. Quality of graphic
Vectors have immaculate quality at any resolution. You may design a Vector graphic to fit on a pen cover and resize it to fit on a t-shirt or even a truck. And all this without a trace of degradation in quality. Rasters which are resolution dependant may fail drastically and appear unclear if scaled up or down to this extent. Vectors graphics have sharper and clear edges as compared to Raster images and are thus most favourable for T-shirt Design.
2. Creativity in T-shirt Designs
T-shirt Design goes beyond aesthetic appeal. Over the years T-shirts Designs have been used as a canvas for expressing ideas, conveying strong messages or humorous ones. Bold slogans, unreal illustrations and funky graphics are more than just a style statement and often reflect the image and attitudes of the people wearing them.
Look around and you are sure to find some really witty T-shirt Designs and some wicked ones too.
Find some awesome t-shirt designs below from top stock Vector websites. You would agree that these cool designs wouldn’t be possible without Vectors.
3. Text rendering capabilities
Bitmap text, even if anti-aliased either appears jagged at the edges or loses its sharpness. Vector outperforms Raster formats in text rendering resulting in sharp and crisp text shapes. Typography is a strong design element in T-shirt Designs and sets the right tone to the message that needs to be communicated. T-shirt Designs with great graphics, mashed up with some mind bending punchlines, in unconventional fonts is a style that would never go out of fashion.
With Vector graphics, you can be sure the type remains as impactful as you intended it to be with perfect quality. Here are some awesome examples of great typography in Vectors for T-shirt Design below.
4. Ease of Printing
The T-shirt Printing process plays an important role in the determining the right image format for T-shirt Designs. Various printing processes like screen printing, heat transfer printing and Direct to Garment printing are popular T-shirt printing processes. All these T-shirt Printing processes give better results with Vector graphics. Colour separation which is an integral part of Fabric Printing is much easier with Vector formats than with Bitmaps.
More often than not, Bitmap images are traced in a Vector application so that better quality prints may be produced.
We shall cover these T-shirt Design Techniques later in another post.
5. Flexibility of Vector creation and editing
Creating Vectors for T-shirt Design involves great amount of creative ability and skill. Illustrators and Graphic Designers use Vector applications such as Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw to produce Vector Artwork for T-shirt Design.
Though the process of creating Vectors for T-shirt Design may be time consuming, it is worthwhile as a Vector artist can create designs straight out of his imagination.
Editing a Vector too is fairly easy as compared to Bitmaps.
At Vector guru we shall look into the process of creating a Vector T-shirt Design in a separate tutorial as this topic is far-reaching and requires a dedicated article altogether.
I hope you learned the advantages of Vector in T-shirt Design and have enjoyed the visual treat of T-shirt Designs posted above. You may go on and download these Vectors from these reliable websites. We shall be back with more on Vector T-shirt Designs, so keep yourself posted.