Advanced SearchWhat, you illustrators thought you were going to get off easy? Illustrations are prone to the same problems as photographs - hurried compositions, poor decisions, and lack of attention to detail. Take the time to elevate your Vector from sketch status by focusing on a few main points:
bortonia
One of the most popular subjects for vector uploads is silhouette traces. Unfortunately, the thing that's often forgotten is that a badly composed source photo will turn out to be a badly composed vector silhouette! Composition and details are critical in a silhouette, since the viewer can't use visual clues like shadows, highlights, or colors to identify what the image is of.
The source photos are good, and you can see what's going on because of the details (shadows, highlights, etc). But the 3/4 angles and tight cropping of the source photos make for lousy silhouette traces. In the silhouette of the photographer, you have no idea what he's holding in his hands, or what he's doing with the object. At first glance it's actually hard to tell it's a person! Same with the couple trace: there's so little detail in the areas of the model's hair and faces that they don't even look like people. The general lack of detail in the outlines is also subpar: the outlines are loose and don't follow the original photo very well.
The acceptable silhouette file was traced from full body photos. Each person is standing in a way that you can clearly see what they are doing. Even though the outlines are simple, the action in each image is very obvious. Because of the clarity of the figure's postures, the viewer won't need additional details to tell what's going on in the file.
absolutely_frenchy
The first subpar example shows an oversimplistic illustration drawn very quickly, with what I would call a naïve use of strokes and gradient applied on every shape. This kind of illustration is really too poor to be useful to a designer.
The second example shows a raster illustration with too many effects added. Some people seem to think that adding effects (like adding some ugly bevel/emboss effect, or adding poor texture) is the same as adding details. Unfortunately most of the time it totally ruins the original image...
The stock image is the right balance between adding too much and being oversimplistic.
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