Illustrator and Figma suck at vectorizing
NOTHING TO SELL
Hey, graphic designer here, been in the trade ~6 years.
Vectorizing is honestly the most important step when you're building a brand or an icon system. Sketch → vector is where everything starts. And every vectorizer I've used (Illustrator Image Trace, Figma Vectorize, the random online ones) is still genuinely awful at it in 2026.
Specifically what pisses me off:
- Adobe quietly removed the Simplify checkbox in the 2025 release and the results somehow got worse
- None of them understand that a circle is a circle. You always end up with a 60-point bezier polygon vaguely shaped like one. Rectangles come out with curved edges and "parallel" lines that drift.
- The presets are useless — they all look identical on actual work
- The preview is slow as hell so you can't tweak settings interactively, you click Trace, wait, undo, repeat
- You can't tell it "keep this line, ignore that wiggle on the paper grain"
So you end up wasting hours every week manually re-snapping geometry after the trace. After the last time I did this on a logo I just snapped and spent a weekend building my own.
A few things that are actually different:
- Real-time preview, every slider updates the trace in ~200ms — no more click-and-wait
- Every slider actually does visible work. (Most other tools have sliders that map to params the engine ignores. Yes, that's why nothing changes when you drag them.)
- Recognises near-circles, near-rectangles and near-lines in monochrome traces and snaps them to exact <circle> / <rect> / <line> primitives in the SVG output
- Pre-blur "Smoothness" that actually flattens hand-drawn wiggle without breaking the strokes
It's not pretending to be AI magic. The engine is open-source VTracer (already best-in-class for raw raster→SVG, beats Potrace and Illustrator on most benchmarks). I added the UI that doesn't fight you and the geometric intelligence layer Illustrator has needed for ten years.
Built it for myself but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one losing the same hours every week. Happy to share a build to anyone who wants to test it on their actual work and tell me what's broken or what's missing.
What would you want in a vectorizer that actually respects your time?
