Computer Graphics

• Competence in computer graphics is now becoming one of the most important skills in the industry.
• Learning how to develop graphics using the techniques used in the industry is more important now than it was 10 years ago since there has been a shift in the way graphics designers are employed (most of them are also website designers)
• Graphics designers get paid well (up to and beyond £40,000) for their work.

• Graphics design is the first stage of development and starts with a concept.
• In this stage, much like building a mockup website, several designers produce their own ideas writing them on paper and then suggesting them to other designers. The process needs to be completely individual so that the ideas are their own and no one else's’ designs.

• There are two kinds of computer graphics; bitmap and vector.
• Bitmap graphics are more common across the world wide web because they are supported by more devices, but vector is more common in the industry.
• One of the greatest features of vector graphics is that they can easily be converted to bitmap graphics, so it is often best to develop a vector graphic and turn it into a bitmap. We will be doing just this.

• Bitmap graphics store the data in a large grid made up of pixels. Pixels are made up of three colours, red, green and blue.
• If you look closely at a computer screen these pixels become obvious.

• Bitmap graphics are made up of pixels which contain information on the amount of red, green and blue in each cell.
  

• Increasing the number of cells in the table (called resolution) allows us to generate better pictures
  

• The more cells in the table/grid we have, the more detailed our picture can be.
• Bitmaps also take up a lot of space as the number of cells gets bigger.
• Bitmaps are made up of pixels which store red, green and blue data in them

• Vector graphics are very common in design since they can later be converted to bitmap (whereas the other way is not as easy) but also because changing them is very easy.
• Vector graphics store information about each object within a graphic, for example an object could be a rectangle, circle or polygon (a shape with no defined number of sides).
• Vector graphics programs are often more difficult to learn but that is what we are going to start on.

• Each time a vector graphics file is opened, the computer reads the data from the file to ‘redraw’ the image. The code of a vector graphics file is shown on the following slide.
• The computer can then figure out what to draw in which pixel of the screen.

The following code sample is how a very simple vector graphic is stored on a computer. Does it look slightly familiar?