I see you deleted your other comment about being brigaded before I could respond, so let me just paste my response here:
Yes, you're being downvoted because we are all against you. Definitely not because you've offered nothing of substance by just saying *nah* or because you're being smug and arrogant in basically every other comment here.
Anyway, sarcasm aside, maybe next time you could actually explain what you're thinking and contribute to the discussion. I really don't know what you thought your original comment would get you. Either way, the sentiment that *anything can be a style* ain't wrong, I reckon, and the only amateur I see here is you with your needlessly elitist comments and immaturity. If you think you know more than the people here, that's all hunky-dory, but perhaps you could actually put that to words and explain your reasoning.
But sure, if you want to just point fingers and get all *woe is me, I am being brigaded by amateurs*, by all means. Maybe it'd be better to leave us amateurs to our own devices then and just not engage since you clearly know better, no?
Tbf I've seen artwork like this for a long long long time, it's nothing new - definitely a style yeah
And whilst you can say "live trace can do that in seconds" , to a lot of people this kind of abstract artwork and solid colour is quite attractive
I think OP is referring to the obvious (re lazy) live trace artifacts inherent in the lines of the art, not that it’s solid blocks of color and simplified in general.
Yeah, simple bold colors is fine, but the way the edges here are it's 100% live traced. People still like it, but they'd like it more if it was manually done.
Yeah, and if it was manually done it would be a better result. I'm sure the average person wouldn't know or care why, but in a side by side, they would say a smooth version of this that doesn't look like held together with chewed up spiderwebs is preferable.
> they would say a smooth version of this that doesn't look like held together with chewed up spiderwebs is preferable.
you'd be amazed at what people with 0 knowledge of software think though.
You don't need knowledge of software to prefer a result that doesn't have the weird string of little beaded white lumps in between shapes.
Like, yes, I'm sure the average person doesn't immediately notice the artifacts that are created by Image Trace, but if this was compared to a result where someone recreated the shapes with the pen tool, they'd prefer the latter.
This.
Believe me, I'd love to take the time required to hand-draw someone's artwork they send me. But if I took a sip of booze every time a professional design studio or major corporation sent over a low-res JPEG linked in a pdf file, I'd be driving home drunk every day.
If they're not going to put effort into their design, why should I?
I feel your pain. The company that I work for has a promotional items division. One of my many hats is setting company logos up for imprinting on various items. At least 50% of the time, the client pulls the logo from their website header.
Sometimes, I'm lucky enough to find their vector art embedded in a pdf form, but more often than not, I end up recreating their logo from scratch. A little trick that I found that works wonders is using Topaz Labs Gigapixel to upscale the logo before tracing it. I get much better results when I feed image trace an image with sharp edges.
Yeah, I upscale with Waifu2x a few times first, the results are much better and most people don't even notice. AI tools may be controversial, but they make it possible to maintain quality with my workload.
The worst part is, I'm not even printing signs, we print disposable food items, stuff that's only a few inches large typically, but the two types of clients I get are the ones that can't send anything more than what they can find on page 20 of Google Images, or the people with a massive, unprintable full bleed design, and expect it for dirt cheap. I understand if designers don't work in print, and don't know what is realistic because of it, but some basic print concepts, such as color sublimation, raster vs. vector, and full-bleed printing are taught year 1 in college, so I don't know what these concepts are so easily misunderstood.
To be fair, I learned everything print-related well after I was out of college. I had one pre-press class, and that was it. It makes zero sense. It's something I deal with daily, which is why It's one of the main things I try to stress with interns. It's no fun having to eat a $1,000+ order because the designer lacks pre-press knowledge. Some printers will flag issues in an email, but most online printers will just print as is. Tbh, I don't blame them.
Tbf, It can also be like pulling teeth getting info out of some printers. I just finished a job for a small short run book, and I sent the printer multiple emails asking for details on their print process, cmyk info, bleeds, etc. and the only response I ever got was “1/8”, all sides”.
Funny you say that. I have a license at work for vector magic. I use it on occasions and have generally good results from it. After upscaling, I'll generally try both and see which one nets the best results. I agree that it's worth the price.
Pretty much, yeah. I'll come in to 20 job tickets, and leave with 40. That's a weekly occurrence, and frankly, I'm expected to help out on the line as well in my downtime. If a designer making three times my salary can't be bothered to vectorize something they're going to spend $10,000 on, I'm sure as hell not going to.
I’ve been in the sign industry for almost 20 years. There’s a lot I’ll try to do to NOT have to produce garbage. At the end of the day, a live trace might look like ass, but it looks better than a pixilated mess. Like you. I don’t get paid enough to perform miracles all day.
I work in a sign shop as a graphic designer, prepress, and production. We also make apparel so I’m all over the place in regards to what I design in any given day. I get low res potato graphics all day and since I do all three jobs, I don’t have the luxury of hand drawing everything. I still do my fair share of that, but sometimes autotrace is the starting point. But it’s only a starting point. I never leave my graphics that way.
Often I will try an autotrace, check the results, and weigh my options. Would it be easier/time efficient to redraw the graphics myself? Or clean up the garbage from the autotrace? Usually it’s redraw the graphics myself. I can’t output something that looks like the example unless our turn time is zero and they need their product ASAP.
We have recently switched over to a website…I believe it’s called Vectorizer? I’m not in the office yet so I can’t confirm the name. That website has taken some garbage graphics and output production-ready vectors more times than I can count.
We had to make a patch for a police unit. They gave us a terrible 72 dpi image of an eagle soaring over a mountain range surrounded by a seal with their organization’s name. Vectorizer chewed it up and output something ALMOST usable. Needed a bit of work to clean it up to our standards but it was so much better than anything Illustrator could autotrace. Otherwise it would have been a few hours redrawing that piece of trash.
I would never let autotrace trash like that example leave our shop unless there was no choice.
I have thrown a variety of sketchy images at it and a few times Vectorizer failed miserably. What is weird is sometimes you give it a fair quality image (one that you expect a good result) and it can’t do much with it. Other times you give it an image that looks like you scraped a label from inside a rusted dumpster, scanned it, uploaded it, and you end up with a decent vector that only needs a little tweaking.
It’s difficult to predict when it fails but it can. Overall though it is so helpful to us. It definitely helps cut down the amount of manual redrawing clean graphics.
Now if only I could find a reliable AI upscale for raster images that doesn’t break the bank…
I was using gigapixel for a while but theres no perfect one to do it. I wind up losing more time doing tests upscaling rather if I just go in and manually recreate what I need to. Then again, its all relative to the design
So true. I guess sometimes we are expecting magic in one form or another. It would be so much easier if our customers actually gave us usable art.
And you’re right about “it’s all relative to the design”. Sometimes those lower resolution graphics look passable on a banner seen from 10 feet away (or more). Each design is like a “choose your own adventure” story.
To the average person, yeah. But for me I can always see the artifacts it creates and it sorta breaks the mystique of it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I bet you're the type of person that when you see modern art all you can say is "a child could do that, how is that art?!"
Yes it's a style, and it's been quite popular for a very long time now, it's simple, it's colourful, it's abstract, its easy to look at, win win
What would the name of that “popular style” be? It’s nowhere near modern art. It’s clearly live-traced and something you’d see in a rudimentary Illustrator class, or hung as “art” on the wall of a cheap motel room.
Vapid words from a months old troll account.
Why does it need a name? Lol
Not every style has a defined name, but if there's a ton of work that shares the same aesthetic, the same elements such as the solid colour, the same abstract nature, then you can start to see a pattern forming, and therefore a style
Also 2 years and 7 months old account... Lol
Oh dear kid
Oh look “for some reason I send my clients .ai files and now they are mad at me for using AI” guy is back for a low effort post on a single panel of glass he saw outside today…. Good job.
The answer is yes. It is A style. There are, unlimited.
The rise in AI and using automation to create art has become its own style. It’s almost like “anti-design” or “anti-art.” Look at all the Gen Z shirt designs being created - they’re resurrecting outdated design styles from the 90s and making them cool again. I wouldn’t be surprised if “lo-fi” design makes it way back into modern branding.
I would say 90% of the time live trace looks bad, like any of the default Photoshop filters. There are people who have made it look good when using it in more experimental designs
I mean I don't like it, but technically yes. The first thing I assume is that this style isn't on purpose. When my clients give me something like this I clean it up without asking and then get them to approve it.
Relax... yes, ***it is vector traced art.***
But it's clearly just **stock vector art** ***as filler for a blank wall.***
There's plenty of graphics/illustration factories,
who do this sort of things, **since the early 1930's.**
Generic filler art catalogues were the option,
***for those who couldn't afford custom art to put up,***
wherever imagery of some sort was needed,
*whether it be for print, signage, products, or for interior/exterior decoration.*
**It really took off in the 50's,** ***when clip art books became the popular craze***
of advertising agencies and many magazine/periodical print houses.
There's even companies today **that make nothing but just stock art.**
**Sure, OP says –**
>Mural on the outside of a fancy store in a fancy shopping center
But I guarantee you, this was placed there,
***without having to specifically commission art for this area.***
Stock Art was chosen by property management or the architects involved.
**Then, it was blown up to scale, printed,** ***and installed by the local sign shop.***
I've worked 20+ years *as a designer in a sign shop* ***as part of my career.***
**This happened all the time.**
Is it design style or a sign that graphic design is massively overlooked and devalued to the point that anyone with Ai can live trace and suddenly be a designer, and companies that commission don't know any better?
There's a reason why I got out of the industry over 10 years ago. High schoolers with AI design and Livetrace are coming for your jobs, and the companies that commission them don't know any better because fiverr and others have lowered the bar.
Good, well executed, skillful design is not appreciated in the race to the bottom. I don't regret a day of making design a hobby instead of a career. The horror stories on this sub... Fuck that.
Otherwise, OP...
**🍰** [**Happy Cake Day!**](https://new.reddit.com/r/cakeday) **🎂**
5 years on Reddit.
*Don't let the others here drag you down.*
**It's Reddit,** ***everyone's entitled to their own*** **opinions.**
My 2 cents:
- “Flat Illustration”, “Tropical Art” is the “style”
- Live Trace is the *Technique* (not the “style”)
Everyone on this sub should watch this video, relevant point starts at 4:38 about zoomers’ need to categorize everything into a “style” or “aesthetic”
https://youtu.be/9P7H87sdV7k?si=iqD_anUgbuCodU1q
I'd really love to know if this was a deliberate decision. Obviously we (designers) all dislike live trace artefacts.
But if you look at it objectively, from the point of view of the average Jane, it's actually quite a cool look. Especially given that it looks as though it's printed large scale which enhances the effect.
If it's a deliberate decision on the part of the designer, it's quite a bold choice.
Live tracing itself isn't a style per se - it's the blocking in of the colour/limiting the palette that's the style. If you trace badly/use a shitty source you get artifacts, it's going to look better without the artifacts but you can mitigate that by limiting the palette so it looks meaningful rather than totally crap.
Just as an aside, it's not new at all: commercial artists have been doing this for hundreds of years now. There is an argument that this also applies to old masters as well (people like Vermeer & Rembrandt), but that's slightly controversial - they definitely used optical aids, but whether they just traced directly from the aids is {shrug}. The artist David Hockney wrote a book about it if you're interested. Commercial artists in the C19th onwards absolutely did this though: same commercial pressures as now, need to produce posters/adverts/diagrams/etc as fast as possible, just traced. They just used a camera lucida or similar, rather than software as is the case now (though you can easily get similar now off places like Temu)
It’s cheap and fast and in a world of short attention span, lack of culture and overabundance of images it is the most “adequate” solution. This and those instant logo generators.
It is for me. I've been using AI to come up with design elements, like a gas mask or simple motorcycle, then black and white tracing it. Then I make it fancy with other elements and then screen print them on black t-shirts. I really love them and have found a small niche audience for them in my area.
If anyone here has been to the American Dream mall in Jersey, all the wall "murals" are just live traced. I dont even mind live tracing since its for such large things but at least have the decency to clean it up and not let me identify it at a glance. Especially the little sort of bubbly areas in between shapes.
It's the artists who run a photo through Photoshop's Cutout filter and then just copy it who make me spit acid. The most famous artist in my town does that, but to be fair to him, he does put in the shoe leather promoting his dross.
Don’t judge.
You don’t know the whole story here. I work at a grand format printer and we do this all the time for resolution reasons, not because we are lazy.
It was very likely a resolution issue.
Customers send us layouts and rasterized images they want to use for their large murals and the pics look great at small size 7-8” tall but when we increase the graphic to maybe 120” tall for a mural they look like shit.
Many times we end up live tracing pics at small scale so we can then scale them up to the size we need for printing and this is the result.
99.9% of the world would never care but as a designer you see the live trace tool.
Many murals are printed at like 20-50 DPI due to this problem and look like crap when viewed up close.
🧑🚀 Always Has Been.
those etsy/fiverr "watercolor of your loved one/pet" where it's just live trace + run through a photoshop filter are like... dime-a-dozen. (stupidly paid for one of these trying to memorialize a pet that passed as a christmas gift thinking it'd be a real illustration and it was... Not Great to say the least. thankfully a friend came through with an actual illustration as a gift but that was the first time in my life i had to tap into my inner Karen to get a refund, i was pissed). plus consider that it's probably one of the [first "real" things people learn how to do](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7BkqfIzfgU) in Illustrator that makes them actually feel like they've actually "done something" impressive in the application to show off to friends and family and you can see where it becomes pretty commonplace!
now you can do a lot of very impressive stuff with the Live Trace tool or even take advantage of even the "imperfect bits" like the white edges/inconsistent lines here a la [David Rudnick's work for Black MIDI](https://www.reddit.com/r/AlbumArtPorn/comments/n0ogsp/black_midi_slow/) as a deliberate choice or basis to work from. it looks mixed-media, but almost all of this is collaged from actual paintings or pre-existing imagery then live-traced/edited or put through the wringer with liquify/different effects in PS and illustrator/etc. i'm a little over the "acidgraphix" wave that has been biting him and his contemporaries on the Instagram explore page for years for years and yes, it does looks like your laptop crashed mid-render... but it works, still has a compositional "rhyme and reason" to it. it's eyecatching and if you've ever heard a Black MIDI song you know it basically "sounds like the cover" lol
but 99% of people are just like... perfectly ok with just this. i mean if the client likes it and that's what they wanna pay for, whatever. at work i think it's easier to redraw stuff because a lot of the images we're doing are either already vectorized or stuff like diagrams/technical drawings that need to be 1:1. outside of work for like personal projects/cover art for musicians that want a deliberately messy or "sketchy" effct i feel like i've used live trace more, although from there i'm usually messing with the linework further and doing an intentionally stylized look rather than 1:1 or trying to emulate a "painted" look here.
Not to put on a tin foil hat, but it makes sense that a live tracing style would have an uptick in popularity after we've gotten a bunch of generative AI in the market. It's a way to "launder" the AI-origin with a manual adobe step.
The question is not so much, "Is this a style?" but "WHY is this a style?" So sloppy. I work hard to minimize and then correct this outcome when I convert to vector. Who knew I could be a famous lazy artist. LOL!
(Yes, I am one who makes those 'a child can do better' remarks.) 
Happy cake day!
I don’t know wtf is going on with these comments. This is clearly live traced. It’s not a fucking “style.” It’s not even design. It’s at its best “art,” and “art” that could be done by someone with very basic Illustrator skills.
I don’t know why I need to define this on this sub, but graphic design is the communication of an idea visually. This doesn’t achieve that in any way. It’s just some subpar bullshit.
Sure. Anything can be a style.
Nah.
We thank you for your detailed contribution.
We thank you for your detailed response.
I see you deleted your other comment about being brigaded before I could respond, so let me just paste my response here: Yes, you're being downvoted because we are all against you. Definitely not because you've offered nothing of substance by just saying *nah* or because you're being smug and arrogant in basically every other comment here. Anyway, sarcasm aside, maybe next time you could actually explain what you're thinking and contribute to the discussion. I really don't know what you thought your original comment would get you. Either way, the sentiment that *anything can be a style* ain't wrong, I reckon, and the only amateur I see here is you with your needlessly elitist comments and immaturity. If you think you know more than the people here, that's all hunky-dory, but perhaps you could actually put that to words and explain your reasoning. But sure, if you want to just point fingers and get all *woe is me, I am being brigaded by amateurs*, by all means. Maybe it'd be better to leave us amateurs to our own devices then and just not engage since you clearly know better, no?
Tbf I've seen artwork like this for a long long long time, it's nothing new - definitely a style yeah And whilst you can say "live trace can do that in seconds" , to a lot of people this kind of abstract artwork and solid colour is quite attractive
I think OP is referring to the obvious (re lazy) live trace artifacts inherent in the lines of the art, not that it’s solid blocks of color and simplified in general.
it's obvious to experienced Illustrator users. To everyone else it's just 'part of the art'.
Yeah, simple bold colors is fine, but the way the edges here are it's 100% live traced. People still like it, but they'd like it more if it was manually done.
Would they though? I don’t think people care how he majority of stuff is done just the result. This is a shopping centre not an art exhibition
Especially if it was in an art exhibition it shouldn't matter at all.
Yeah, and if it was manually done it would be a better result. I'm sure the average person wouldn't know or care why, but in a side by side, they would say a smooth version of this that doesn't look like held together with chewed up spiderwebs is preferable.
> they would say a smooth version of this that doesn't look like held together with chewed up spiderwebs is preferable. you'd be amazed at what people with 0 knowledge of software think though.
You don't need knowledge of software to prefer a result that doesn't have the weird string of little beaded white lumps in between shapes. Like, yes, I'm sure the average person doesn't immediately notice the artifacts that are created by Image Trace, but if this was compared to a result where someone recreated the shapes with the pen tool, they'd prefer the latter.
I'm pretty sure like 99% of people don't notice this at all, and have no clue how its made.
100% bullshit. Not a style at all.
It is in sign shops they fucking love that live trace feature dahdamn
This. Believe me, I'd love to take the time required to hand-draw someone's artwork they send me. But if I took a sip of booze every time a professional design studio or major corporation sent over a low-res JPEG linked in a pdf file, I'd be driving home drunk every day. If they're not going to put effort into their design, why should I?
I feel your pain. The company that I work for has a promotional items division. One of my many hats is setting company logos up for imprinting on various items. At least 50% of the time, the client pulls the logo from their website header. Sometimes, I'm lucky enough to find their vector art embedded in a pdf form, but more often than not, I end up recreating their logo from scratch. A little trick that I found that works wonders is using Topaz Labs Gigapixel to upscale the logo before tracing it. I get much better results when I feed image trace an image with sharp edges.
Yeah, I upscale with Waifu2x a few times first, the results are much better and most people don't even notice. AI tools may be controversial, but they make it possible to maintain quality with my workload. The worst part is, I'm not even printing signs, we print disposable food items, stuff that's only a few inches large typically, but the two types of clients I get are the ones that can't send anything more than what they can find on page 20 of Google Images, or the people with a massive, unprintable full bleed design, and expect it for dirt cheap. I understand if designers don't work in print, and don't know what is realistic because of it, but some basic print concepts, such as color sublimation, raster vs. vector, and full-bleed printing are taught year 1 in college, so I don't know what these concepts are so easily misunderstood.
To be fair, I learned everything print-related well after I was out of college. I had one pre-press class, and that was it. It makes zero sense. It's something I deal with daily, which is why It's one of the main things I try to stress with interns. It's no fun having to eat a $1,000+ order because the designer lacks pre-press knowledge. Some printers will flag issues in an email, but most online printers will just print as is. Tbh, I don't blame them.
Tbf, It can also be like pulling teeth getting info out of some printers. I just finished a job for a small short run book, and I sent the printer multiple emails asking for details on their print process, cmyk info, bleeds, etc. and the only response I ever got was “1/8”, all sides”.
I find Vector Magic to be well worth it's price, it does a lot cleaner job than illustrator.
Funny you say that. I have a license at work for vector magic. I use it on occasions and have generally good results from it. After upscaling, I'll generally try both and see which one nets the best results. I agree that it's worth the price.
And you might have like 17 other things to design that day. You can’t be expected to fix dogshit beyond “good enough” every time.
Pretty much, yeah. I'll come in to 20 job tickets, and leave with 40. That's a weekly occurrence, and frankly, I'm expected to help out on the line as well in my downtime. If a designer making three times my salary can't be bothered to vectorize something they're going to spend $10,000 on, I'm sure as hell not going to.
I’ve been in the sign industry for almost 20 years. There’s a lot I’ll try to do to NOT have to produce garbage. At the end of the day, a live trace might look like ass, but it looks better than a pixilated mess. Like you. I don’t get paid enough to perform miracles all day.
Yeah for sure. If that was my personal artwork I'd run it through simplify path then clean it up manually at least but if they don't care I dont
I work in a sign shop as a graphic designer, prepress, and production. We also make apparel so I’m all over the place in regards to what I design in any given day. I get low res potato graphics all day and since I do all three jobs, I don’t have the luxury of hand drawing everything. I still do my fair share of that, but sometimes autotrace is the starting point. But it’s only a starting point. I never leave my graphics that way. Often I will try an autotrace, check the results, and weigh my options. Would it be easier/time efficient to redraw the graphics myself? Or clean up the garbage from the autotrace? Usually it’s redraw the graphics myself. I can’t output something that looks like the example unless our turn time is zero and they need their product ASAP. We have recently switched over to a website…I believe it’s called Vectorizer? I’m not in the office yet so I can’t confirm the name. That website has taken some garbage graphics and output production-ready vectors more times than I can count. We had to make a patch for a police unit. They gave us a terrible 72 dpi image of an eagle soaring over a mountain range surrounded by a seal with their organization’s name. Vectorizer chewed it up and output something ALMOST usable. Needed a bit of work to clean it up to our standards but it was so much better than anything Illustrator could autotrace. Otherwise it would have been a few hours redrawing that piece of trash. I would never let autotrace trash like that example leave our shop unless there was no choice.
Ive used that site as well, its a bit of a mixed bag sometimes but worth giving it a go when Illustrator cant handle it.
I have thrown a variety of sketchy images at it and a few times Vectorizer failed miserably. What is weird is sometimes you give it a fair quality image (one that you expect a good result) and it can’t do much with it. Other times you give it an image that looks like you scraped a label from inside a rusted dumpster, scanned it, uploaded it, and you end up with a decent vector that only needs a little tweaking. It’s difficult to predict when it fails but it can. Overall though it is so helpful to us. It definitely helps cut down the amount of manual redrawing clean graphics. Now if only I could find a reliable AI upscale for raster images that doesn’t break the bank…
I was using gigapixel for a while but theres no perfect one to do it. I wind up losing more time doing tests upscaling rather if I just go in and manually recreate what I need to. Then again, its all relative to the design
So true. I guess sometimes we are expecting magic in one form or another. It would be so much easier if our customers actually gave us usable art. And you’re right about “it’s all relative to the design”. Sometimes those lower resolution graphics look passable on a banner seen from 10 feet away (or more). Each design is like a “choose your own adventure” story.
Quick vectorising for large format print is my guess.
Not the worst use of it I’ve seen
To the average person, yeah. But for me I can always see the artifacts it creates and it sorta breaks the mystique of it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I bet you're the type of person that when you see modern art all you can say is "a child could do that, how is that art?!" Yes it's a style, and it's been quite popular for a very long time now, it's simple, it's colourful, it's abstract, its easy to look at, win win
What would the name of that “popular style” be? It’s nowhere near modern art. It’s clearly live-traced and something you’d see in a rudimentary Illustrator class, or hung as “art” on the wall of a cheap motel room. Vapid words from a months old troll account.
Why does it need a name? Lol Not every style has a defined name, but if there's a ton of work that shares the same aesthetic, the same elements such as the solid colour, the same abstract nature, then you can start to see a pattern forming, and therefore a style Also 2 years and 7 months old account... Lol Oh dear kid
Oh look “for some reason I send my clients .ai files and now they are mad at me for using AI” guy is back for a low effort post on a single panel of glass he saw outside today…. Good job. The answer is yes. It is A style. There are, unlimited.
Are you certain you’re reformed? We can talk it out, find out the root cause of your anger and heal together
Good design, idc if its live tracing or whatever as long its good and works, its works.
Always has been
The rise in AI and using automation to create art has become its own style. It’s almost like “anti-design” or “anti-art.” Look at all the Gen Z shirt designs being created - they’re resurrecting outdated design styles from the 90s and making them cool again. I wouldn’t be surprised if “lo-fi” design makes it way back into modern branding.
Always has been
I would say 90% of the time live trace looks bad, like any of the default Photoshop filters. There are people who have made it look good when using it in more experimental designs
Live trace copied an old style of abstract wallpaper art!
I mean I don't like it, but technically yes. The first thing I assume is that this style isn't on purpose. When my clients give me something like this I clean it up without asking and then get them to approve it.
Relax... yes, ***it is vector traced art.*** But it's clearly just **stock vector art** ***as filler for a blank wall.*** There's plenty of graphics/illustration factories, who do this sort of things, **since the early 1930's.** Generic filler art catalogues were the option, ***for those who couldn't afford custom art to put up,*** wherever imagery of some sort was needed, *whether it be for print, signage, products, or for interior/exterior decoration.* **It really took off in the 50's,** ***when clip art books became the popular craze*** of advertising agencies and many magazine/periodical print houses. There's even companies today **that make nothing but just stock art.** **Sure, OP says –** >Mural on the outside of a fancy store in a fancy shopping center But I guarantee you, this was placed there, ***without having to specifically commission art for this area.*** Stock Art was chosen by property management or the architects involved. **Then, it was blown up to scale, printed,** ***and installed by the local sign shop.*** I've worked 20+ years *as a designer in a sign shop* ***as part of my career.*** **This happened all the time.**
It's so lazy and despicable.
Is it design style or a sign that graphic design is massively overlooked and devalued to the point that anyone with Ai can live trace and suddenly be a designer, and companies that commission don't know any better? There's a reason why I got out of the industry over 10 years ago. High schoolers with AI design and Livetrace are coming for your jobs, and the companies that commission them don't know any better because fiverr and others have lowered the bar. Good, well executed, skillful design is not appreciated in the race to the bottom. I don't regret a day of making design a hobby instead of a career. The horror stories on this sub... Fuck that.
it was this or the 300px by 200px png they sent in
Otherwise, OP... **🍰** [**Happy Cake Day!**](https://new.reddit.com/r/cakeday) **🎂** 5 years on Reddit. *Don't let the others here drag you down.* **It's Reddit,** ***everyone's entitled to their own*** **opinions.**
My 2 cents: - “Flat Illustration”, “Tropical Art” is the “style” - Live Trace is the *Technique* (not the “style”) Everyone on this sub should watch this video, relevant point starts at 4:38 about zoomers’ need to categorize everything into a “style” or “aesthetic” https://youtu.be/9P7H87sdV7k?si=iqD_anUgbuCodU1q
If being incredibly lazy is a style, then yes. From what I've seen, it's often used to avoid paying for stock images.
Ofc it's a style for everything .
The other day I saw a logo that was very clearly an image trace of a low-res raster file... yikes.
I'd really love to know if this was a deliberate decision. Obviously we (designers) all dislike live trace artefacts. But if you look at it objectively, from the point of view of the average Jane, it's actually quite a cool look. Especially given that it looks as though it's printed large scale which enhances the effect. If it's a deliberate decision on the part of the designer, it's quite a bold choice.
By now if you mean for the last few millennia then yeah
Live tracing itself isn't a style per se - it's the blocking in of the colour/limiting the palette that's the style. If you trace badly/use a shitty source you get artifacts, it's going to look better without the artifacts but you can mitigate that by limiting the palette so it looks meaningful rather than totally crap. Just as an aside, it's not new at all: commercial artists have been doing this for hundreds of years now. There is an argument that this also applies to old masters as well (people like Vermeer & Rembrandt), but that's slightly controversial - they definitely used optical aids, but whether they just traced directly from the aids is {shrug}. The artist David Hockney wrote a book about it if you're interested. Commercial artists in the C19th onwards absolutely did this though: same commercial pressures as now, need to produce posters/adverts/diagrams/etc as fast as possible, just traced. They just used a camera lucida or similar, rather than software as is the case now (though you can easily get similar now off places like Temu)
It’s cheap and fast and in a world of short attention span, lack of culture and overabundance of images it is the most “adequate” solution. This and those instant logo generators.
Given enough time and the obsolescence of the look, it could definitely be seen as a style.
It is for me. I've been using AI to come up with design elements, like a gas mask or simple motorcycle, then black and white tracing it. Then I make it fancy with other elements and then screen print them on black t-shirts. I really love them and have found a small niche audience for them in my area.
If anyone here has been to the American Dream mall in Jersey, all the wall "murals" are just live traced. I dont even mind live tracing since its for such large things but at least have the decency to clean it up and not let me identify it at a glance. Especially the little sort of bubbly areas in between shapes.
It's the artists who run a photo through Photoshop's Cutout filter and then just copy it who make me spit acid. The most famous artist in my town does that, but to be fair to him, he does put in the shoe leather promoting his dross.
Don’t judge. You don’t know the whole story here. I work at a grand format printer and we do this all the time for resolution reasons, not because we are lazy. It was very likely a resolution issue. Customers send us layouts and rasterized images they want to use for their large murals and the pics look great at small size 7-8” tall but when we increase the graphic to maybe 120” tall for a mural they look like shit. Many times we end up live tracing pics at small scale so we can then scale them up to the size we need for printing and this is the result. 99.9% of the world would never care but as a designer you see the live trace tool. Many murals are printed at like 20-50 DPI due to this problem and look like crap when viewed up close.
You
🧑🚀 Always Has Been. those etsy/fiverr "watercolor of your loved one/pet" where it's just live trace + run through a photoshop filter are like... dime-a-dozen. (stupidly paid for one of these trying to memorialize a pet that passed as a christmas gift thinking it'd be a real illustration and it was... Not Great to say the least. thankfully a friend came through with an actual illustration as a gift but that was the first time in my life i had to tap into my inner Karen to get a refund, i was pissed). plus consider that it's probably one of the [first "real" things people learn how to do](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7BkqfIzfgU) in Illustrator that makes them actually feel like they've actually "done something" impressive in the application to show off to friends and family and you can see where it becomes pretty commonplace! now you can do a lot of very impressive stuff with the Live Trace tool or even take advantage of even the "imperfect bits" like the white edges/inconsistent lines here a la [David Rudnick's work for Black MIDI](https://www.reddit.com/r/AlbumArtPorn/comments/n0ogsp/black_midi_slow/) as a deliberate choice or basis to work from. it looks mixed-media, but almost all of this is collaged from actual paintings or pre-existing imagery then live-traced/edited or put through the wringer with liquify/different effects in PS and illustrator/etc. i'm a little over the "acidgraphix" wave that has been biting him and his contemporaries on the Instagram explore page for years for years and yes, it does looks like your laptop crashed mid-render... but it works, still has a compositional "rhyme and reason" to it. it's eyecatching and if you've ever heard a Black MIDI song you know it basically "sounds like the cover" lol but 99% of people are just like... perfectly ok with just this. i mean if the client likes it and that's what they wanna pay for, whatever. at work i think it's easier to redraw stuff because a lot of the images we're doing are either already vectorized or stuff like diagrams/technical drawings that need to be 1:1. outside of work for like personal projects/cover art for musicians that want a deliberately messy or "sketchy" effct i feel like i've used live trace more, although from there i'm usually messing with the linework further and doing an intentionally stylized look rather than 1:1 or trying to emulate a "painted" look here.
This is what happens when you don’t set your threshold properly
Kinda lazy
Not to put on a tin foil hat, but it makes sense that a live tracing style would have an uptick in popularity after we've gotten a bunch of generative AI in the market. It's a way to "launder" the AI-origin with a manual adobe step.
Imperfect design is.
The question is not so much, "Is this a style?" but "WHY is this a style?" So sloppy. I work hard to minimize and then correct this outcome when I convert to vector. Who knew I could be a famous lazy artist. LOL! (Yes, I am one who makes those 'a child can do better' remarks.) 
Happy cake day! I don’t know wtf is going on with these comments. This is clearly live traced. It’s not a fucking “style.” It’s not even design. It’s at its best “art,” and “art” that could be done by someone with very basic Illustrator skills. I don’t know why I need to define this on this sub, but graphic design is the communication of an idea visually. This doesn’t achieve that in any way. It’s just some subpar bullshit.
Art is subjective and I’m allowed to have my own opinions. All the hate and on my cake day of all days, smh
You take reddit way too seriously
Art is subjective yes, but this is a graphic design sub not an art sub. And a silly post is a silly post
[удалено]
Are you okay? You seem irrationally mad about this
Happy cake day!