WEB DESIGN

GRAPHICS

world

wide web



Using several software and hardware tools for Graphic Development, offering animation or images gives any site an eye pleasing effect. Graphics are important because many people are surfing the web looking for sites that give that eye pleasing effect.



ARTISTIC SOFTWARE - Create Picture Perfect Graphics

The Gimp and Paint Shop Pro are among tools used to create graphics. If you need pictures taken, have an experienced photographer come to your business and take shots of anything you would like on your site. Using the Gimp or Paint Shop Pro you can modify any image to display the effect you want. If you use Windows 98® , it comes with a nice imaging program in the accessories section that can modify pictures quite nicely. You can also consider using a larger program like Corel Draw that will do everything you need in one package, but that also comes with a hefty price.

Graphics are a excellent way to put across effect. Not just what graphics you use, but also how they are placed and the time it takes to load them. Many people today are still using 28.8K modems, and a page full of graphics would tend to have these users click the STOP button and navigate away from your site. Imaging software can reduce an image to a small loading size, while still maintaining its integrity. If several images are required, create thumbnails (scaled images of the actual picture). Users can click on any thumbnail of interest and load that image. This would keep load time faster, and not reduce the number of images you wish to display.



FILE FORMAT - Not all pictures are saved the way they are created

The two most common formats are jpeg and gif. They each have their own compression method, and which one you use makes a difference in the load time and quality.

JPEGuses its own compression method, that defaults to a quality of 75% of the image being saved. Some data is lost by rounding errors and certain assumptions made in the encoding process. This makes Jpeg what is known as Lossy compression. The best way to illustrate this is to save a drawing in jpeg format then reopen it. Each time you reopen and save, you have a loss of data. This would seem to discourage the use of jpeg format, but the truth is, it remains one of the best ways to compress images and transfer them over the world wide web.

Repeated decoding and encoding can result in information loss and poor image quality




GIF format on the other hand, saves data with no loss, and as a result, is better for images and drawings that contain lines or text characters. A disadvantage of GIF format is that it is limited to 256 colors, making it a poor format for photographs or images that need more than 256 colors. The largest advantage to GIF format, is that it is the only format that can save multiple images in a single file creating what is known as an animation. An example of a GIF animation would be the revolving globe at the top of this page.

ThePNG format was actually created to replace the GIF, because there are certain legal complications with using and displaying GIF's on a web site. As a result PNG is very much like GIF, with the exception that PNG can support true color images; however, like GIF it cannot store a color table larger than 256 colors. So if your system does not support true color, then PNG will display 256 color format, a situation that can give unpredictable results. PNG also cannot support multiple images, which is the key to creating GIF animation.

if all you are looking for is some great graphics to view, try Digital Blasphemyor Getty Images





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