[arocks]

Vector art is not often the holy grail as it seems. Take fonts, for instance. Even though formats like TrueType stores the data in vector format, numerous resolution-dependent "hints" have to be added to make it more readable.

Similarly vector icons appear more blurry than pixelled ones especially at lower resolutions. Extremely scaled images are unimpressive due to loss of detail.

Vector art often works well in a certain range of resolutions. The "infinite scaling" promise should be taken with a grain of salt.

[bjourne]

> Vector art is not often the holy grail as it seems. Take fonts, for instance. Even though formats like TrueType stores the data in vector format, numerous resolution-dependent "hints" have to be added to make it more readable.

While true, font hinting is thankfully finally going the way of the dodo. Cell phones and other handheld devices has very crisp fonts without any aliasing and hinting thanks to their high pixel density. The magic threshold is at about 150 dpi which when passed makes hinting redundant. Desktop displays are getting there, albeit slowly. To slowly for my taste. OS X already doesn't use hinting which is why if you are used to Windows fonts, os x fonts can look blurry. But with then new retina displays os x's text rendering simply looks amazing.

[thisrod]

> The magic threshold is at about 150 dpi

Is it really so low? That's 20 dots per 10 points; surely you'd notice if a glyph was supposed to be symmetric, but it actually had 10 pixels on one side and 9 on the other. Also, Metafont does hinting, and Knuth must have intended to print taocp at a higher resolution than that.

[nwh]

Vector art can look very good when optimised for smaller sizes. The issue is that the current formats and engines for vector use on the web.

I've spent a lot of time trying to tweak my vector icons to work well in various browsers, and its next to impossible at the moment. More often than not SVG graphics are larger than their bitmap counterparts, almost always crash WebKit browsers, or take 5-10 seconds to render. Safari on iOS will crash if you zoom in on even the most simple graphics.

I love vector artwork, I truly do. It's the rendering engines that are letting us down.

[bennyg]

It depends on the nature of the work. I could make a beautiful illustration, then scale it from here to the moon and, at least to me in my hypothetical situation, it would still look good.

Like all things, it depends. Some people crave detail, some crave resolution, some crave anything beyond the monotony of everyday life - regardless of said work's mediocrity.

Vector art can be good. Pixel art can be good. Neither are going away any time soon. I think that's the only rational conclusion to any of this.