Vector graphics and bitmaps
Digital graphics media first emerged in the 1980s. Desktop scanners
and more efficient graphics tablets soon followed, enabling designers
to digitise hand-drawn artwork for the first time. The development
of digital drawing and image-editing software during the late 1980s
heralded the arrival of early vector graphics and bitmaps. In simple
terms, vector graphics are geometric formations such as lines,
points and curves, which are based on mathematical equations to
represent a digital image. They produce clear lines that are suitable
for drawing flats or specs; linear quality is not reduced when scaled
up or down in size. Bitmaps are the data structure represented by a
grid of pixels that makes up a digital image, measured as dots per
inch (dpi). Pixels are the building blocks of bitmap images such as
digital photographs and scanned images. The more pixels an image
has per unit, the better the quality of the image for colour and
resolution. Bitmaps are also known as raster graphics and are
stored in various image files such as JPEGs or TIFFs.