Transcript

I’m Daniel Titus and I’m a graphics designer.  I want to talk to you today about a few advances that graphic design is making for mobile use.  We all know that mobile use is huge, it’s on the rise, and one of the things that we do in the web community to accommodate that is with the use of SVG images.  Now SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics.  And basically the concept is when you have a normal image on the web, be it a JPEG or a PNG, as you zoom in, as you scale them, they lose their quality and they become very aliased or results in what we refer to as pixilated.  Well, with SVG images you don’t do that.  They use a vector technology as opposed to a raster technology.

The difference between a raster image and a vector image is that a raster image uses points instead of equations and nodes that a vector image would use.  So if you take a raster circle, it’s made up of a whole bunch of different points, and as you zoom in on it it becomes very aliased or jagged or full pixilated.  Whereas, a vector circle is going to use a couple of nodes and an equation, so as you zoom in on it it continues to stay smooth and is an actual circle rather than several points that try to make up a circle.

Now the reason that’s so important is because if you’re on your tablet, if you’re on your phone, the first thing you do when you go to a website is you zoom in on—or, you know, go to the area that you want to read or that is of interest to you.  And so when you zoom in all the text looks great but all of a sudden the images start to just deteriorate before your very eyes.  Well the reason is that’s because you’re using the raster technology and SVG uses the vector technology.  So basically, you can zoom in as far as your device can let you and it retains its quality the entire time.  It can be literally as large or as small as you want it to be without having to include an extra file and without having to take up extra space on the server.

If you’d like to learn more about SVG images, you can take a look at the blog portion of my website and go to danieltitus.com/blog.