Vector Art
Vector graphics allows styles widely known in graphics design for quite a long time. It is very popular for commercial use, such as in logos, labels, icons, widgets and advertisements. These designs are generally flat, but near realistic designs gain popularity with the advent of digital vector art.
In this section I try to concentrate more in the creative portion of the work I have been doing about vector graphics, giving some samples, and explaining in few words how they were produced, as well as what have inspired them. I try to not be too technical, giving priority to simplicity, easy of use, focusing on smart details, and not drowning into long discourses. I'm not a professional designer by any means. My background is mostly scientific, but all my work is greatly influenced by graphics design. The goal of this section is to show this influence in my professional life, apart from my technical expertise.
I start with some of beer labels I created for my prior brewery, followed by icons, illustrations, designs, etc. In some of these examples I explain the steps taken on the creation as well as their inspiration. A more complete list can be found on my Vector Art Github repository.
Beer Labels Designs
All these beer labels were designed entirely from scratch, from their names until the last details of the label. Giving attractive and fun names is often a good strategy for maketing a product. Combining with modern, unusual, and attractive artwork can easily boost product acceptability. Here are some samples of the creativity involved in these designs at the list on the left and below:
Technical Illustrations
Vector graphics really excels in technical illustrations. Below I show a realistic technical illustration of a data structure called octree. The correspondence between the octree and its representation in space is shown. The space is recursively subdivided in eight equal sized regions called octants. These octants are represented and contiguously stored in arrays with eight positions as shown on right. If the octant is not empty it points to another array of eight positions and so forth until the last level is reached. On the lower right corner, the coordinates of the voxel nearer to the observer in a space with resolution 32³ (the space represented in this octree) are placed in a table to show how their bits are grouped to form an index in the array at each of its five levels. In this way, indexes can be converted to coordinates and vice-versa.
Realistic designs
Realistic designs can be simple and can even recall sketches. A good example are the drawings in Tintin's comic books. The icon on the left I created on Illustrator by doing a "stencil copy" by hand of comic book panel on the right:
Icons
The design of icons is similar to any vector design except that it is expected that the icon will be seen with a quite small size, and, thus, it has to be sufficiently thick and not very detailed in order to be distiguishable when shown with smaller sizes. This is also applicable to any other objects that will appear with a small size.
Below is an example of this principle. The design on the right is the original one. It was made by first vectorizing a bull skull from a photo, and then retouching it to simplify, refine it and to reinforce symmetry. For example, the eye and other details on one side were mirrowed from the center of the skull, but other details were left intentionally asymmetrical to reinforce realism.
On the other hand, what is needed in an icon is that its lines must be thick enough to appear when shown in small sizes. The design on the left is obtained by further manipulating the original in order to thicken the lines for this purpose. The result with colors applied is shown on the left column.
Minimalist Icons
Design and icons in this page
The icons symbolizing the contents of all pages in this site as well as in the landing page are all SVG vector artworks with characters from TinTin comic books. The landing page design was inspired from "4 options vector created by rorozoa". Even though nearly the whole original design was a good fit, it was slightly redesigned, some new options were created and a new item was designed from scratch by applying the same technique used in the original artwork. This exemplifies the versatility of vector graphics, allowing to reuse existing vector artworks, and to redesign, to modify, and to add brand new elements to them, while conserving the underlying style.
Pop stack icon example
