Posts Tagged ‘vector’

Stunning vector images at Designious

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

In a previous post I linked to sites where you can buy and sell vector images. Those sites have big collections of vector images made by many different artists, but this means that the quality of the illustrations are not always the best. But there are also sites dedicated exclusively to vector images made by one person, team, or company. Designious is one such site, and they have a huge selection of beautiful vectors to choose from.

Designious sells dozens of $15 themed packs with many vector images in each one. The categories include Floral, People, Nature, Buildings, Skulls, Scrolls, Halftones & Grunges, Wings, and more. These packs are also available in Mega Packs and Giga Packs, which are great if you want to buy multiple normal packs, because you can get them for half price! They also have dozens of striking T-shirt designs for $10 each.

If you want to try before you buy, you can go to their free downloads page, where you can find free vector packs, T-shirt designs, icons, and some stunning illustrations.

Floral vector packMy favorite floral design is “Floral vector pack 19“, which is filled with beautiful vines and flowers! Most of them are meant to be used as abstract silhouettes, but you can still color the vines and flowers separately with a little more work. Just copy and paste your image, and remove the part of the drawing you don’t need (for example everything except a flower). Repeat until you have separate images for each part you want to give a separate color to.

I have also tried the “Cartoon girls vector pack“, which contains 17 vector images of women in different poses, with different hair and clothes, and of different nationalities. My first thought when I saw them was that they would be perfect to use in personal websites and blog designs! I really love using vectors instead of bitmap images, because it’s so much easier to change the colors to my liking. I had great fun changing the colors of their hair, skin, clothes, and even their make-up! Try doing that so easily in Photoshop :P

Cartoon girls vector pack Users who don’t have Illustrator might have some problems with the parts of the images that are colored with gradients – I use VectorDesigner, and some of the girls from this pack were missing clothing or hair! :P Luckily I also have ZeusDraw, and was able to get around this problem by importing the EPS file as a PDF, and then converting the PDF to objects. But if you’re lucky enough to have Illustrator, you shouldn’t have any problems ;)

Browsing through the Designious vector packs has given me a lot of ideas and inspiration for new designs, and I can’t wait to get started! :D

Where to buy and sell vector illustrations

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

You probably know that there are sites in which you can buy and sell stock photos, but did you know there are also sites in which you can buy and sell vector illustrations? There aren’t as many as the stock photo sites, but there are still a lot of great illustrations available.

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VectorDesigner tutorial: How to convert raster to vector images

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

This is a simple tutorial on how to convert raster images to vector images using VectorDesigner. VectorDesigner has a built-in “Convert raster to vectors” command under the “Arrange” menu, but unfortunately the results when converting complex images (i.e. images with more than one color ;) ) aren’t too good. This means that we first have to take a few steps to prepare our image for conversion. Read under the cut for both a text and a video tutorial.

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ZeusDraw review

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

ZeusDrawIcon96x96.pngZeusDraw is a vector application that I found a few days ago on MacZot. At first glance it didn’t seem interesting, but I took the time to watch the demonstration videos and was blown away by the simplicity and intuitiveness of it’s brush and color controls. I’m no expert with graphic applications, but brush capabilities are something even I have found sorely lacking in the cheaper (i.e. not made by Adobe) graphic applications for Mac. They all allow you to paint with a brush, but usually the only things you can customize are the size, color, and softness. With ZeusDraw, on the other hand, it’s a different story entirely.

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