Getting started with the Effect gallery in Vectornation

Vector shapes are crisp by nature, and sometimes that is the problem. A poster may want the grain of paper, a logo mock up may want a painted look, and a background may want a soft blur. Vectornation by Zaweba includes 56 live pixel effects for these jobs, applied to vector artwork without turning it into a picture for good.

They are grouped into Artistic, Blur, Brush strokes, Distort, Pixelate, Sharpen, Sketch, Stylise, Texture and Video, and each effect has its own options.

Browsing with the Effect gallery

With so many effects, picking one from a menu by name is guesswork. Effect > Effect gallery opens a browser with thumbnails, so you can see roughly what each effect will do before you choose. Click through a few groups with your artwork selected and you get a quick sense of which family suits it.

The gallery also stacks several effects. You might add a brush stroke effect for a painted look and then a texture on top to give it the grain of canvas. Stacking in the gallery means you can see the combined result and adjust each layer before applying it.

A few effects worth knowing

Glowing edges, in the Stylise group, traces the edges of artwork in bright lines on a dark ground. It can turn a plain illustration into something that looks lit up, and suits posters and covers.

Texturiser, in the Texture group, can use your own texture pictures. Scan a sheet of watercolour paper, photograph a wall, or use any texture image you have, and apply it to your artwork. Using your own textures keeps work from looking like everyone else's.

The Blur and Sharpen groups are practical rather than decorative. A blurred background shape helps the foreground stand out. Sharpening is mostly useful when your artwork includes placed images.

The Artistic, Brush strokes and Sketch groups imitate traditional media. They work best on artwork with clear areas of colour and contrast, and less well on fine detail, which they tend to smudge away.

Document raster effects settings

Because these effects produce pixels, they need a resolution. The document raster effects setting decides it, with choices of 72, 150 or 300 ppi or a value of your own.

Use 72 ppi while you are trying ideas, as the screen redraws faster. For on screen graphics 72 or 150 is usually enough. For print, set 300 ppi before you send the file, so the effects come out as sharp as the vector parts around them. Changing the setting does not damage anything, because the effects are live and are rendered again at the new resolution.

Keeping it live

The point of having these as live effects is that you can change your mind. Recolour a shape and its painted look follows. Resize it and the effect is rendered again. Turn the effect off and the plain vector shape is still there. Avoid rasterising artwork by hand just to get a pixel look; the live effect gives you the same result with nothing lost.

Good habits

Apply pixel effects to the parts that need them, not to whole pages. A texture on a background shape and crisp, effect free lettering on top usually looks better than texture over everything, and it keeps text sharp in print.

Keep a consistent set. If an illustration uses one brush stroke effect, use the same effect and settings on related pieces, so the set looks painted by one hand. The gallery makes it easy to try everything, so it is worth deciding on a small palette of effects for a project and sticking to it.

With the gallery for choosing and live effects for changing your mind, the pixel effects in Vectornation give you texture and softness while the artwork underneath stays as clean as when you drew it.