Purpose-built by a working illustrator, not a software company.

The project was a series of highly detailed hand drawn waterfowl illustrations — Great Blue Heron, Osprey, and several more — destined for a limited-edition cup series and other merchandise for Rise Up Coffee Roasters on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Each bird was drawn in black ink with fine crosshatching and detail work. The kind of illustration that looks great on paper but turns into a muddy mess when you hit "Image Trace" in Illustrator. Paths everywhere, lost details, blown-out line weights. The image size restrictions built into the program prevented me from getting the results I needed.

I tried every tool I could find. None of them gave me the control I needed — the ability to dial in exactly how aggressively to trace, to preview instantly, to batch-process an entire series with the same settings, to undo and compare different approaches side by side.

So I built Vector Bot. And it worked! All eight birds, vectorized to production quality, in a fraction of the time. The cups are approved, out in the world for folks to enjoy, and now Vector Bot is too.

If you've ever fought with Image Trace and thought "there has to be something better" — this is it. Made by someone who had the exact same thought. And likely does the same thing as you for a living. Vector Bot is a raster to vector app made for illustrators by an illustrator.

Check out this demo: