As you can see from the image above, one logo portion is clear and one is pixilated. Bitmap images, like photos, are made up of little pixels that are assigned a color. These pixels are put together to make up an image.

Vector graphics are mathematical shapes that can be filled in with solid colors or gradients. Because the shapes are based on mathematics they can be scaled up or down with absolutely no loss in image clarity and quality.

Above is a portion of my SimpleDocs.com logo. The blurry one is zoomed in using photoshop and the clear one is zoomed in using illustrator. Because I created this logo in adobe illustrator the logo is completely scalable, i.e. vector. This means if I needed to print my logo on a huge banner I can do so with no distortion. As you can see from the photoshop zoom, if I created this logo in a bitmap program like photoshop I wouldn’t be able to scale this logo very large without distortion.

As you may have noted by now, adobe illustrator is a vector graphics program. The files created in illustrator will be completely scalable, which is very useful when creating graphics that need to be scaled with absolute clarity. Photoshop is a bitmap program used to manipulate or touch up photo type images, including creating backgrounds or textures.

The problem with a vector program like illustrator is that it doesn’t allow you to take a paintbrush and simply paint and blend colors the way photoshop does. When you use the paintbrush tool in illustrator you create a path that you stroke with a certain color. When you use the paintbrush tool in photoshop you actually fill in the affected pixels with color. This means you can pick a different color and paint next to it and get a blended color effect in photoshop that you can’t do in illustrator. This makes photoshop ideal for photo type images and illustrator idea for scalable graphics, such as logos, and various web graphics.

In the following SimpleDocs, I’ll be using photoshop to make background images and illustrator to make graphics.