Vectr review

I often use Pixlr as a quick online photo editor, and recently noticed a new product, Vectr. I was intrigued because it made vector based graphics. (If you don’t know what those are and why you should use them, here’s a post that explains.)

I tested out Vectr by trying to make a version of my new blog heading.

I soon noticed was that picking typefaces from the dropdown menu was a nightmare. Because this is an online app, you can’t add new fonts. You take what you’re give. Fortunately, there’s a huge variety of typefaces, but unfortunately, few familiar ones. You can’t filter for “serifs” or start typing a name. You have to scroll down laboriously. You want a substitute for Times New Roman? Happy hunting.

In Firefox, the name of the typeface was duplicated, once in a plain sans serif and a second time in the typeface itself. It was near impossible to read and know what you’re getting.

I thought that couldn’t be right. On a hunch, I opened up and tried Chrome. The typeface list was displayed correctly.

(Aside: I am deeply annoyed that we’ve had web browsers for over twenty years and I still run into pages that render differently on different browsers.)

You can pick colours for everything, but you either need to be happy with eyeballing the colour or work out a hex value. You cannot input RGB or CMYK values directly. And I didn’t see the “Recently used” button did anything.

You can import images in several formats, both pixel based (*.jpg and *.png) and vector based, including *.svg, Adobe Illustrator (*.ai) and *.eps. By the way, the import of an *.svg file I tried was more accurate than CorelDraw 2020.

You get a much more limited range of export options, though. Just three: *.svg, *.jpg, and *.png. It is a bit weird that this bills itself as a vector based illustration program and two of the three export options are pixel-based.

Some features, like alignment, are buried in “right click” menus rather than being visible on the main page. In fairness, I did not run through the tutorials.

The end result of my tinkering:

Not horrible, but I could not duplicate some elements I had created in CorelDraw, notably the shape I used for “Soon to be” and the strike throughs.

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Will it scale?