Digital Home Thoughts: Using Bitmap Programs for Print Jobs

This will be heresy to the graphic designers reading this site, but for the rest of you, it's amazing what can be accomplished when you have enough pixels and a high enough PPI value - the line between vector and bitmap images starts to disappear.

For instance, common wisdom holds that business cards should be designed in a vector-based program such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw - something that mixes graphics with text and outputs a vector file where the text can be scaled up and down in size without a loss of quality. But what if you don't have access to that kind of software? Crank up the PPI and you'll be fine: my business cards are designed in bitmap-based programs such as PhotoImpact and Photoshop, and you'd need a magnifying glass to see the pixels. As long as you start out with a high-resolution image (I'd say 3000 x 2000 pixels or so), and you're printing at a small size, you can achieve excellent results without needing to go with a vector graphics program.