Raster instead of vector cost me a whole afternoon

I was working on a logo for a local coffee shop in Tucson last Tuesday and kept getting weird fuzzy edges when I scaled it up. Turned out I had the whole thing as a raster layer inside Illustrator without realizing it. A buddy of mine glanced over my shoulder and just said "dude, check your layers panel." Has anyone else spent way too long on a mistake that simple?

2 comments

2 Comments

john_hunt27d ago

Spent three hours once trying to figure out why my export kept looking like pixelated garbage. It was set to 72 DPI for the web. Not my finest moment. You learn that stuff once and never forget it, hopefully.

shah.evan7d ago

Wait, is DPI even the real culprit here or is it something else like the color profile messing with the export? @john_hunt2 I feel like a lot of people blame DPI but actually it's the image scaling algorithm or the fact they're exporting from a raw file without checking the resolution first. Had a buddy spend hours on a logo export only to realize his canvas size was 500x500, not the 5000x5000 he thought it was. DPI is a label, the pixel dimensions are what really matter.