Board Thread:FAQs/@comment-35455126-20190806204017/@comment-4010415-20190806230252

There are a lot of people who confuse the meaning of "vector" since vectors tend to have transparent backgrounds. What Ark is wanting is for each infobox image to be a .png file with a transparent background instead of just a screenshot that's been cropped down, rather than an actual vector. A vector is a very specialized image file that can be resized without losing quality (i.e. getting really pixel-y), unlike other image file types like png and jpeg.

One big reason that we don't crop the backgrounds out of the infobox images is because RWBY actually has a lighting engine that's used in pretty much every scene in the show. The way that the lighting interacts with the character model and affects the way their colors look would make it look really weird if we cropped the background out. In all honesty, it would look bad in a lot of cases. Thus, changing to transparent background images would complicate choosing an infobox image even further than it already is.