Ever wanted to take a small picture and make it REALLY BIG and look smooth? Damn those jaggies, huh? I recently heard about VectorMagic, which apparently spawned from the loins of a Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (whew, mouthful) project. James Diebel and Jacob Norda are two smart guys: you just upload an existing bitmap image — which I bet you have! — and go through some steps to optimize tracing quality. It works pretty deliciously, and for emphasis' sake, IT'S FREE!!!!

I'm thrilled to see web tools like this which offers something excellent without a need to download and install YAP (Yet Another Program). Another fine example is rsizr, the Flash app that offers online image retargeting.

But anyhoo, back to VectorMagic, I took my "Torley Linden" signature — the same one affixed  to every Tip of the Week post:

and in a few minutes and playing with settings, had it vectorized as a 3-color (counting the white background) graphic, which I saved to disk as an EPS. I then Photoshopped some layer effects atop the works, and it turned out pretty swell:

Keep in mind I can resize this as large or teeny as I want, and aside from some un-organic looking angling, it was pretty faithful about keeping my original, digital penstrokes.

VectorMagic can be used on any kind of bitmap image with varying results, and I reckon it can produce unintended-yet-artistic effects on photographs. I believe it could work small wonders on Second Life snapshots taken in Depth mode, something I might want to experiment with later, but in any case, I encourage you to give it a go!