December 23, 2024
by Holly Landis / December 23, 2024
Whether you’ve always dreamed about being an artist or you’re already working in graphic design, technology has made it possible for anyone to live out their artistic fantasies.
Using AI and digital illustration software, you can transform your business with custom graphics, from logos to social media imagery. With a little help from AI, you can quickly make high-resolution vector art that scales anywhere from a business card to a billboard.
Vector art contains graphics made up of points, lines, geometric shapes, and curves based on mathematical formulas. Unlike raster images, which are made using colored pixels, vector art retains sharp edges and clarity, even when zoomed in.
This scalability makes vector art ideal for use in posters, logos, billboards, and other advertising. It can even be used to create 3D graphics and renderings.
Vectors can be used to create digital art or illustrations that businesses use for promotional purposes, such as a visual brand identity and the logos and marketing materials that go along with it.
You can make vector art by hand using digital tools, starting from scratch to design your artwork. But with the increasing prevalence of AI, you can now create fully-formed vector art with a few simple text prompts in an AI image generator. The algorithms within these are designed to mimic the human brain, which means that you can create creative and visually appealing graphics in a few minutes.
Yes and no - it’s both! Vector art is a subset of graphic design. While the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, vector art specifically refers to images created using mathematical equations within digital illustration tools. On the other hand, graphic design is a broader field encompassing various creative techniques, including but not limited to vector illustration.
The sky is really the limit when it comes to the different types of vector art you can create, either from scratch by hand or with the help of AI tools.
Since vector art is based on lines, curves, and shapes, geometric styles are some of the easiest to create. The combination of shapes and colors can convey very different moods - bright colors evoke fun and excitement, while neutrals can create a darker, moodier tone.
Whether you’re using 3D graphics for branding or to create mockups of three-dimensional objects like new products or a building design, vector art is an ideal way to get this look digitally. Beyond making your brand pop, 3D text can create a lifelike composition of product ideas to help you pitch more effectively to your team or investors.
Creating photorealistic vector art with gradients is one of the best uses of AI image generation in this field. Despite being created within software, these images are tailored to resemble real photos
A current trending style is line art, which features clean, minimalistic lines to depict identifiable objects in an image. Though not heavily detailed and often in black and white, this style offers a timeless elegance that’s simple and beautiful.
An iconic look from the 1970s, this type of design style is ideal for creating vector art thanks to its distinct form using lines and curves. It's bold and bright, so works well for brands looking to make a big statement with their branding and convey a sense of energy and fun.
Depending on your software, you can save your vector art in several file formats, such as:
Every software that allows you to create vector art with AI will work differently, but there are some overlapping features to help you get the most out of your machine learning tools with fewer revisions and prompt follow-ups.
To get started with your AI vector art, you should:
Image made using Canva
While many have argued that using AI to create art removes the essential human element from creativity, there are so many advantages to using these tools to get you started or to enhance the ideas you already have.
Finding a balance between automation through AI and your own artistic vision is essential, but once you have this, you’ll find that many of the advantages of using AI for vector artwork are in your favor.
Not everyone is a natural-born Picasso or Da Vinci. Maybe you’re particularly good at one particular style of art, but that’s no longer working for you, or you want to try something new. Artificial intelligence is one of the best ways to do this, allowing you to experiment with colors and textures and offering a way to step outside your usual artistic boundaries.
One of the biggest benefits of AI lies in its automation. It can take up parts of the creative process that you find boring or time-consuming, such as photo editing and rendering, 3D adaptations, or even duplicating different parts of an image. This means that you’ll create your art more quickly and spend more time on the elements of creating that you enjoy most.
Although some AI tools require a subscription, there are plenty of free vector art software that help you create something new at no cost. Even if you’re paying a fee for a more robust program, AI image generators can create high-quality designs for a fraction of the cost of a graphic designer or illustrator.
AI image generator enables you to make visually appealing and diverse designs based on the prompt inputs that you’ve given. These text-to-image features allow you to create and edit graphics quickly and easily.
To be included in the AI image generator software category, platforms must:
* Below are the top five leading AI image generator software solutions from G2’s Summer 2024 Grid Report. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.
Canva is an end-to-end AI visual communication and design tool that allows anyone to create graphics, regardless of their design skills. As an online design and publishing platform, Canva provides user-friendly tools for graphic design that work for non-designers and designers alike.
“Canva is one of the software that provides an all-in-one solution to design/edit graphics, videos, and PPTs using a simple and easy-to-use interface. Its AI features and integration of third-party add-ons make it different from others. It is easy to implement without having technical skills.”
- Canva Review, Manoj J.
“Canva provides a robust design experience while online. It falls short by not offering offline editing capabilities, restricting the flexibility to work on projects at any given time or place.”
- Canva Review, Milly S.
As a one-stop app to create and collaborate, Simplified provides AI-enhanced, no-code design editors that allow you to create marketing materials, collaborate across your team, and publish to social media or your website. The AI tools can help you remove backgrounds, create animations, or resize images easily.
“Simplified helps us streamline and simplify our design and content development processes so we can create high-quality images, videos, and text quickly and easily and integrate them into our social media campaigns. There are many pre-designed templates that I can customize using different AI technologies.”
- Simplified Review, Carmen M.
“The AI likely won't provide deeper subjective evaluation or critiques that a seasoned human expert could. Important qualitative insights could be missing.”
- Simplified Review, Jack R.
Adobe Firefly is Adobe’s proprietary generative AI tool, helps you create graphics in Photoshop that expand on your natural creativity. A step up from previous AI models, Firefly understands prompts better using natural language processing (NLP) tools, helping you create more realistic vector art and more.
“The integration with Photoshop allows us to replace certain sections only, which is the way to increase the size of a picture and automatically add the fill for that. And if we need a complete image created from scratch, we also have that support.”
- Adobe Firefly Review, Cesar Daniel Z.
“Sometimes it's difficult to know what prompts to use to get exactly what you want, and sometimes the prompts that I use don't fully follow”
- Adobe Firefly Review, Parisa H.
As the world’s largest AI network, Pareto has integration options for over 200 artificial intelligence. You can design your own AI or an established workflow from other programs and the Pareto community to design and create your vector graphics.
“How fast it is when generating the images and how accurate it is to most of what I requested. I tried other image-generating AIs, and this one takes the cake, no doubt. Beautiful images and scenery to complete the shot.”
- Pareto Review, Laís A.
“Some of the templates for creating use too many credits.”
- Pareto Review, Felipe P.
AKOOL is a generative AI tool that’s designed for personalized visual marketing and advertising. Create studio-quality videos with AI avatars and commercial-level graphics that elevate your marketing and take your business further.
“AKOOL provides us with AI-enabled content generation functions which allows us to create very creative marketing content. It has not put any limitations on the way we can play around with our content styles, and this has allowed us to create very futuristic content to capture the attention of audiences and, therefore, attract more buyers. We are very much delighted by the avatar creator tool that helps us add very realistic faces to our content.”
- AKOOL Review, Brian T.
“There are some inconsistencies in prompts, e.g. when I use the same prompt words, I get images in different styles. Also, when using video swap, the background color and speed keep changing.”
- AKOOL Review, Nyambura M.
With AI image generators, you can create unique vector art that makes your business stand out from the competition. Harness your creativity and let AI do the hard work for you. So what are you waiting for? Start working on some new AI vector art right now!
Learn what else generative AI can do for you and your business with large language models.
Holly Landis is a freelance writer for G2. She also specializes in being a digital marketing consultant, focusing in on-page SEO, copy, and content writing. She works with SMEs and creative businesses that want to be more intentional with their digital strategies and grow organically on channels they own. As a Brit now living in the USA, you'll usually find her drinking copious amounts of tea in her cherished Anne Boleyn mug while watching endless reruns of Parks and Rec.
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