Figma's Vectorize Tool Skips the Trace, Not the Judgement

Figma's new Vectorize tool turns a raster image, a scanned sketch, a screenshot, a logo photographed off a wall, into editable vector paths inside Design or Draw. It sits alongside the Eraser and Paint tools Figma shipped in August, and the pitch is simple: stop redrawing things that already exist as pictures.

We have tested tools like this before and the results were usually messy enough that redrawing by hand was faster. Vectorize is noticeably better at holding clean edges on logotypes and simple illustration, which is most of what lands on a designer's desk needing this treatment. It still struggles with photographic detail and busy line art, which is exactly where you would expect an automatic tracer to give up.

The real change is what it does to handoff. A client email with a low res logo attached used to mean a slow manual rebuild before anyone could touch it in a design system. Now it means a few seconds of Vectorize, a quick cleanup pass, and straight into the file. That is a small saving on any single job, but it adds up over a year of client assets that never arrive in the format anyone actually wants.