Graphic Design & Print Production
2,000+ print-ready vectors, traced by hand or through a hybrid pipeline I built.
- Role
- Graphic Design, Vectorization, Art Direction
- Year
- 2022-2026
- Print-ready artworks
- 2,000+
Over 2,000 of these since 2022. This is a sample of the wall.
The pipeline
TAGsports prints custom sports gear, and every order starts as customer art in whatever state the customer had it. My job since 2022 has been turning that into print-ready vectors, at volume, on an hourly contract where wasted time is wasted money.
- 01
Intake
The order and the customer's source file arrive through ZenDesk.
- 02
Assess
I judge the source quality and decide whether it survives a direct trace.
- 03
Trace
Clean sources get manually vectored in Illustrator. Sources too far gone go through the AI-assisted path: ChatGPT restores the image, then automated vectorization gets it to paths.
- 04
Check
Every output is reviewed and corrected by hand, whichever path it took.
- 05
Proof
Final art lands on a proof sheet for customer approval.
The hybrid path is an automation I designed into this workflow. On an hourly agreement it means fewer billable hours per piece, and the output still gets the same manual check. The automated route misses often enough that manual tracing is still the main skill, so I use it to sort the work rather than to replace it. On the odd job where a hyper-blurry source has to hold up on a five-inch sticker, the restoration step is what makes the piece possible at all.
I also produced short-form Instagram ad videos for TAGsports in After Effects.