500 Byte Images: The Haiku Vector Icon Format (2016)
The problem with vector icons is that they don't really scale as well as people seem to think.<p>Just because you can rasterise it at any size, doesn't mean that the resulting icon makes sense at that size. When icons are really small you usually want a simpler version of the same icon for it to remain recognisable.<p>You can see it clearly in the examples used in the article for the 16x16 icon. Compare the bitmap version (<a href="https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/images/apps-images/i-o-m-bitmap16.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/images/apps-images/i...</a>) to the vector version (<a href="https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/images/apps-images/i-o-m-vector16.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/images/apps-images/i...</a>) , the bitmap version is specifically made for the low resolution and is still very clear, the vector version is a blurry mess.<p>To properly handle this you'd need either multiple versions or a vector format that can scale the amount of detail with the size. In either case you'd need to ensure that the rendering has pixel-perfect results at small sizes so it doesn't become a blurry-mess, kind of defeating the purpose of using a vector format.<p>Vector images work great for large icons, but for small ones they fall short.