Why your Photoshop logo cannot go on a hoarding

The phone call every beginner gets

You made a logo in Photoshop. It looked sharp. You sent it to the printer for a six-metre hoarding and got a message back: *send vector*. You sent the same PNG at 300 dpi, larger. Same message.

Nothing is wrong with your design. The file is the wrong kind of thing.

A raster file — PNG, JPG, PSD, a Photoshop document — stores a fixed grid of coloured squares. A 2000 × 2000 PNG stores exactly four million colour values and no other information about the picture. Enlarge it to six metres and each of those squares becomes about three millimetres wide. Software can guess what belongs between them, and modern upscalers guess well, but a guess is not the edge you drew. On a hoarding, an edge that was one pixel wide is now a soft three-millimetre smear.

A vector file stores something else entirely: instructions. Not "these pixels are black" but "a closed path starting here, curving to there with this tangent, filled with this colour". Nothing in that description has a size. When the file reaches the printer, the RIP — the software driving the press or the large-format machine — reads the instructions and draws them fresh at whatever resolution that machine actually has. Six metres or sixteen pixels, it is drawn cleanly both times.

What the instructions look like

You can read them. An SVG is plain text:

<svg viewBox="0 0 100 100" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  <circle cx="50" cy="50" r="40" fill="#c0392b"/>
  <path d="M35 50 L65 32 L65 68 Z" fill="#ffffff"/>
</svg>

That is a play button. It is about 200 bytes and it is sharp at any size, because there is no size in it. The same mark as a PNG large enough for a hoarding would be tens of megabytes and still soft.

Open any SVG on your machine in a text editor. Seeing the coordinates is the fastest way to stop thinking of vector as "a better kind of picture" and start thinking of it as a description of geometry.

Where vector is the wrong tool

This is not a hierarchy where vector wins. Vector is bad at photographs, and the failure is worth understanding because people meet it by accident.

Auto-trace — Image Trace in Illustrator, Path > Trace Bitmap in Inkscape, PowerTRACE in CorelDRAW — converts a raster into paths by finding colour boundaries. On a flat logo scanned from a business card, it works. On a photograph it produces thousands of overlapping blobs, because a photograph has no flat regions. A traced portrait can carry 60,000 nodes. The file is enormous, it will not redraw smoothly on your screen, and it can time out on the press's RIP. Print shops lose jobs to this every week.

So: photographs stay raster, and belong in image editing. Logos, type, diagrams, maps, icons, signage, packaging die-lines and anything that must be cut, engraved or stitched are vector.

Resolution independence also does not mean quality independence. A clumsy curve stays clumsy at six metres — it becomes a very large clumsy curve. Vector removes one failure mode. It does not remove drawing.

What to install, including if you have no money

• CorelDRAW is the tool of the Indian print trade, of signage shops, of garment and screen-printing units across South and Southeast Asia. If you want paid work at a local press, this is the file they will hand you. It is a paid product; Corel has sold both a subscription and a one-off perpetual licence, so check what is on offer now.
• Adobe Illustrator is what agency job ads ask for. Subscription only.
• Inkscape is free, open source, runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and is a genuinely capable vector editor. It draws, edits nodes, does booleans, does type on a path, exports SVG, PDF, EPS and DXF. It is weaker on colour management for press and slower on very heavy files. Nothing else in this course is out of its reach.
• Affinity Designer was for years a one-off purchase, which made it the obvious escape from subscriptions. After Canva acquired Serif, the Affinity apps were relaunched in 2025 with free access and some features behind a paid tier — confirm the current terms before you plan around it.
• On a phone, real node editing is unpleasant on a small screen, but it is possible: Infinite Design on Android, Linearity Curve on iPhone. Use a phone to review a PDF and mark it up. Build on the largest screen you can reach, including a cyber café machine.

Install Inkscape today if you have nothing. The concepts in the next eight lessons are the same in all four programs; only the menus move.

One thing to check right now

Open the logo you are proudest of. If the only file you have is a PNG or a JPG, you do not have a logo yet — you have a picture of one. Redrawing it as vector is the work of the next four lessons, and it is the difference between a file a shop can print and a file they will email you back about.