vector vs. raster: a fight to the death

okay, probably not a fight to the death. it is, however, a constant, never ending war in the heart of every designer, for this project or that project or this piece or that within one bigger thing.

first some preliminary getting-things-straight, directly from my design education without even plagiarizing anything, so it's like a pop quiz i'm giving myself!:

raster, aka bitmap: very simply, a map of bits. built out of rectangular grids of tiny pixels, bitmaps generate curves by staggering such tiny little square things in such particular shapes and tints that by the time you zoom out to a viewing distance, it looks round. things that have horizontal or vertical edges look great, regardless. they are especially good for blending and shading, getting very smooth interactions between colors or tones. photographs are necessarily raster images. they are scaleable down, but not up except for maybe within a very small window before you start seeing all the pixels one by one and the illusion falls apart.

vector: made out of math! the exciting point of vector objects is that they are infinitely scaleable. rather than being yea-many pixels down or across, they are governed by equations that can be replicated proportionally no matter to what size you're trying to scale it. vectors are perfectly smooth and clean, with no blurry edges, no matter how closely you zoom in. they make flat, 2-d shapes with crisp lines, but are difficult to blend across or together. blending in vectors could mean mathematically calculated gradients, or layers of vector objects, each one a flat color just a hint different than the one adjacent to build up gradiated shapes.

so. those are some good and bad things about each format. how does this apply to our posters currently?

the most basic interpretation would be that our line compositions, not tied down to a size or a location; a graphic element, a platonic ideal of sorts; would be vectors. they are transcendental!

our photography, on the other hand? human and earthbound! rich with complexity and subtlety but fragile, operating only within a window of fleeting, flattering possibility. textural: perhaps soft, perhaps gritty, but tactile, and with natural looking shadows and light.

but what if we bring our line compositions down to our plane? bring them form their lofty vector home down into the world, with stuff, and things, and textures. we can project them, or wag them around on scannerbeds, and then what do they become?

projections, i guess, would become raster, given our photographic documentation. those clean vectors would suddenly become inhabitants of our world, subject to the drywall and carpet and pixellation upon capture. what does that do to their meaning? they become soft, or jagged; humanist like photography.

scans and xeroxes, though, develop a sort of hybridization... fraught with human contact, and then finally wrought again out of pixels, but without the textures of the world, as though we've reached into their world with our dirty hands and shaken them around a little bit.

if we re-vector these things, does it mean salvation? suddenly even photographs can transcend, just like religion, by giving up the physical nature of human existence, by abandoning the texture and the blur.

what has the option of looking older? more well-worn? more futuristic, or modern? and of course, the connotations that can be drawn from the use of one or the other or a combination of methods, brought together into one iconic identity-poster. for a kansas city neighborhood.

anyway, have you really ever stopped to consider the philosophy of vector & raster imagery?