All articles · 2026-09-02

PNG vs SVG: what designers, printers and developers actually need

When a PNG is fine, when only a vector will do, and how to convert between them without losing the sharpness of your artwork.

A PNG stores a grid of coloured pixels. An SVG stores instructions — "draw a curve from here to there, fill it with this colour". That single difference explains almost every practical question about the two formats.

When PNG is the right choice

• Photographs and anything with continuous, textured detail
• Screenshots and UI captures
• Fixed-size assets where file size matters more than scalability

When only a vector will do

• Logos on signs, vehicles, shirts and business cards
• Icons that must be crisp on every screen density
• Anything a cutter, plotter or engraver has to follow
• Artwork someone else will recolour or edit

Converting PNG to SVG properly

A vectorizer should never simply wrap the PNG inside an SVG tag — that is still pixels. Curvora writes only real geometry, keeps transparency, snaps flat fills to the exact source colours and turns smooth shading into true gradient fills. The statistics panel shows the number of paths and nodes so you know what you are getting.