drawanyway.com

Apologies if you’ve already seen this: it’s been cropping up on lots of different blogs over the last few days. I include it for those who haven’t yet seen it, because I was quite impressed by what it can do. Vector Magic is intended for the use of those designing logos. By changing an image from pixels, which can represent a variety of irregular shapes, to vectors, which are based on pure geometric shapes, Vector Magic cleans images up and gives them an air of professionalism.

Fine. Obviously, logo designers need clean images. But the interesting thing is what happens when you start putting rough and ready artwork into it. It’s not designed for this, but the results can be interesting. There are various settings which you can play about with, and the site urges you to do so. I uploaded the image I drew some time ago for a post about spotting good subjects for drawings, and was quite surprised by how slick the final image came out.

The other interesting point to note is that it can reduce or enlarge images without loss of quality. That’s something I often need to do in my work, and which would no doubt also be useful for serious illustrators and graphic designers, too.