Imagine this: a brand emails you about licensing a design you made two years ago. You are thrilled. Then you get to the second paragraph, where they mention they need the file in vector format, and they need it by tomorrow.
That happened to me (and shocker, I did not have the file). So I stayed up all night learning how to rebuild it, sent it off in the morning, and then spent the next week wondering if I had done it wrong.
In this post I’m walking through every case in my own business where a client, a printer, or a platform needed a vector file, what it made possible, and what it almost cost me. My hope is that it will help you make the decision about whether or not you even need to learn how to use vectors!
the all-nighter
The design was a floral repeat. I had built it in Procreate, exported a big beautiful PNG, and called it done. The licensor wanted it as a vector so their production team could scale the motifs up and separate the colors for printing.
I said yes before I knew how. Then I opened Affinity Designer and figured it out overnight (with help from coffee and reddit forums).
I did deliver it, but I was 99% sure they were going to reply to tell me how much I had messed it up because at the time vectors were a total mystery to me.
what is a vector anyway?
Let’s start by talking about pixel-based art, which is what most people are familiar with. For example, you draw in Procreate, and pixels go down on the canvas to make the shapes you drew. If you zoom in really closely, you can see the tiny squares, and those are the pixels. Most artists fully understand this concept!
Vectors aren’t made of little squares. Instead they are made of mathematical points. For example, a pentagon is five mathematical points equally spaced from each other. No matter how big you make the pentagon, the math is the same. This same thinking applies to any shape, and that’s why vectors are so versatile. The program uses math rather than pixels, so you can up-size your work to any scale without it getting blurry.
professional printers
Many creatives discover by accident that a lot of professional printers will not take a raster files at all. That includes plenty of fabric printers, large format printers, packaging printers, and specialty product printers.
So when you can’t supply a vector file, you’re leaving yourself out of those conversations before they even start.
I’m not saying that you need to make every piece of art you create out of vectors, but I do think it’s one of those skills that every artist needs to know if they want to leave themselves open to a wide range of opportunities.
wallpaper
Wallpaper deserves its own mention because the demand keeps growing and the scale requirements are genuinely different.
People want big, bold motifs on their walls. Not a tiny floral repeating a hundred times, but a large scale design where one flower might be a foot wide. Some wallpaper printers require vector outright. The ones that don’t still want files at a scale that raster art usually can’t reach without falling apart.
Wallpaper has gone from 0% to 50% of my print-on-demand income, and none of it would have been possible with the vector-based files I was making in 2018.
logos and brand work
I’ve designed logos for a handful of brands, and this one is not negotiable. A logo has to work on a business card, a storefront sign, an embroidered hat, and a website favicon. So any brand who knows anything about logos will require a vector-based file type.
If you’ve ever wondered whether you could take on a small branding project, this is the skill standing between you and yes.
sellable graphics
The next case where I always need vector-based files that I make in Affinity is my sellable graphics. Buyers, like graphic designers and businesses, want to be able to purchase graphics and then resize or recolor them to make them fit their brand. This is one of the most steady and low-effort methods that I use to sell my work. A few hours spent on a graphics pack turns into regular income for years!
If you want to see exactly how I build these, I walk through my whole process in this tutorial on designing sellable clip art on your iPad, including how I export vector, SVG, PNG, and PSD versions of the same set, all exported from Affinity.
the thread running through all of it
Not one of these cases was something I planned for. The licensing request, the printer requirements, the logo work, the wallpaper scale, the shop I barely maintain. Every one of them showed up as an opportunity that required a file format: vectors.
That’s the real argument for learning vector. Not because raster is bad (I still draw in Procreate daily), but because starting in vector means you’re never the person saying “let me get back to you on that.”
Take the next step: I’m teaching a free workshop in September called Sketch to Sellable, and it’s the exact thing I wish I’d had before that all-nighter. We start in Affinity Designer from scratch and finish with a repeat pattern you could actually sell. Three video lessons drop on September 3, 10, and 17, and we meet live on September 8 and 15 at 12pm ET so you can ask me questions while you work. Come make something with me.
Come Make Something Sellable With Me
The free Sketch to Sellable Workshop, September 2026:
- Three video lessons taking you from a blank Affinity Designer file to a finished repeat pattern
- Two live sessions (September 8 and 15 at 12pm ET) where you can ask me anything while you work
- Professional vector files you can send to printers, licensing contacts, and print-on-demand shops
- No experience with Affinity Designer required, and the software itself is free
