SignsToday.me Blog

As you may or may not know, when uploading your own artwork for printing as part of your design at SignsToday.me, you should pay attention to the size of the print area and the physical dimensions of your artwork.  A tiny .gif or .jpeg simply cannot be stretched large enough and maintain the quality of the print for say, a large canvas print.

However, sometimes the perfect image is in an unscalable format, and you’d like to enlarge it, but maintain the original quality of the image.  Well, great news–vector graphics were created to solve just this problem.  A vector graphic (common file extensions are .svg, .eps, and even .pdf) can be resized to any dimensions with virtually no loss of quality of the image.  Thus, they are commonly used in the printing industry.

So, how do you convert your .gif, .jpg. or .png into a vector graphic?  If you don’t have access to an expensive graphics program, such as Adobe Illustrator, this could be a tricky problem.  You could always ask your printer to convert the file for you, but this could entail extra charges.

Fortunately, the easiest and best-quality way I’ve found is to use an online tool called Vector Magic (http://www.vectormagic.com).  You simply upload your image, and it’s automatically converted to a high-quality vector graphic, suitable for any use!  And the quality of the vector images is generally pretty amazing–it performs better than Illustrator’s Live Trace function in my opinion.

It’s not free (although, they were offering 2 free uses with the creation of a free account–not sure if this still applies), but it could be a lifesaver if you need to transform a 2 inch square logo into a 10 foot wide canvas banner by tomorrow!  Very cool stuff, indeed!