If you don’t know the difference between vector and bitmap files, this is a good reason to find out. Here’s my explanation: If you take a picture (in the form of .jpg, .gif, .png, etc.) and increase it’s size, you’ll notice that the quality of the picture gets worse. That’s because if the picture is made up of 100 pixels, by increasing the size of the picture (which is saved in a bitmap form) you are effectively increasing the size of each pixel, hence making the tiny little buggers more visible to the eye. The result is a more grainy look which is characteristic of low quality pictures.

Now back to the topic. Unlike bitmap, a vector graphic is one that uses mathematics in order to calculate its shape. For instance if I am using software such as Adobe Illustrator to draw a line which may contain 100 pixels, and then I extend the line by dragging one of its corners, then I am sending a signal to the computer that I want the line to increase in size and the computer then adds pixels to fill the space. So if I double the size of the line, it should now have 200 pixels as opposed to 100 pixels that are twice the size. So vector files = quality is untouched and bitmap files = don’t mess with the size!

To draw our directions card for our wedding venue, I wanted to trace a Google Map image in order to keep the proportions correct. I started by placing the image below into Keynote (Apple’s equivalent to Power Point but 1,000,000 times better – no bias here).

You can do this by using a screen capture tool, pressing the “Print Screen”  button on your PC, or Shift+Command+4 on a Mac and selecting the area you want to capture.

I then traced the route using a line drawing tool. You will find this under “Shapes” in Keynote. What this allows you to do is to click along the line of the road while a line joins the point you are on with the previous one. The more clicks the smoother the line. This being a graphic tool, the line is a vector file so there’s no degradation to the quality of the image if it is resized later.

Below is a picture of the tracing process. Don’t worry about making mistakes. You can always click on a a single point along the line and either move it or delete it.

Once I had the lines traced I played with the sizing of the stroke to emphasize the highway. To do that, you first select the line you want and then from the Graphics Inspector you change the stroke of the line. Although in the picture below I used two thicker lines to emphasize the highway, you will see later on that I then changed to a single line of stroke thickness 23px for the highway and 6px for the side roads.

I then added some directional arrows and text, again from the “Shapes” menu, and removed the now traced satellite image by moving it out of the way. A couple of more details included a blow-up of the traffic circle close to the hotel, and some labels to indicate the road names, etc.