Web Graphics - You Have To See It To Believe It
Show them what you mean with web graphics
Some web topics can be explained in words, sometimes only a picture will do. Web graphics tell your story in pictures, but what kind of graphic formats do you use? There's gif and jpg and png and psd and tiff and bmp. Let's not forget eps and ... what the heck?
All of those graphic formats have their place but only two should be used on your web site. The first two, gif and jpg will be used on the web, the rest have their place in print or somewhere in the image manipulation process.
Which graphic format do you use where?
There's exceptions to every rule but:
- jpg - use this format for your web graphics when you have a photo or any image that has a lot of continuous color with many shades and variations. Skin tones are a great example of this. If you try to create a photo as a gif, you will see a lot of blotchy patches and it will look, well ..., awful.
- gif - use this when you have a limited number of solid colors, like an image created in a drawing program, a logo, for instance.
Always optimize web graphics!
Very important! Graphic files need to be small to load quickly. If you just took the perfect digital photo and want to put it on your web site, size it to fit your layout and then use your image editing program to optimize the file so it takes less space and loads fast. Most programs have this feature now and if you don't want to get too involved just use the default settings and you will be way ahead of many amateur web builders.
Optimizing an image compresses the file. It removes some of the data without changing the appearance on the computer screen. Computers show very little image data so it will not make much difference, you can experiment with how much optimization to apply and see what looks best.
Web graphics - keep your visitor in mind.
More computers are connecting to the internet with high speed connections every day but not everyone has one yet. If you have to show someone your image in all of its full size and uncompressed glory, have a link that allows them to download it if they wish. Otherwise, they may get frustrated waiting for the download, click off of your site and see nothing at all.
