from Andrea Papaioannu

Presentation vs. content: Graphic Formats

As every good designer should know, between presentation and content is the last one which is more important, being the reason why a peculiar page is placed on the Web. Although repeating the mantra "content is king" and "less is more" could lead us to completely set aside the graphic side of the page, making a great mistake: a complex content needs to be transmitted in a proper way to the user and to do this is necessary to be extremely careful about the used form.

The formal element with the main visibility (and the most easily criticized) are naturally the images, which often represent the good or the bad luck of a site: how many times did we leave a site due to an ugly design or to files so "heavy" to take a whole lot to download?

Leaving apart the problems related to taste and artistic skills, in this article we will try to understand how to choose the right format to obtain the best compromise between quality and dimensions.

The first consideration to be made is that if it's true that an image is worth 1000 words, nonetheless is true that it takes a thousand times more to download. Even if, obviously, a physically (i.e. in pixel) enormous image is downloaded in more time than a small one, the problem of the "weight" of an image is calculated mainly in terms of bytes, so taking into account the considered format.

Leaving aside the formats which are currently trying to get used, two are the main formats recognized by almost every browser software: GIF and JPEG. Even if an image can (or must...) be created other formats (TIFF, TGA etc.), it will have to be sooner or later converted, to be inserted into a Web page.

Both our GIF and JPEG present features which can prove useful, and for our luck, these are very different; thanks to these differences, in fact, we can resolve almost all the situations of our daily work by simply choosing the format most suitable for the purpose; to do this, naturally, we have first to know what these features are and the put them into comparison with each other.

go on...

1. Presentation vs. content: Graphic Formats
2. GIF, this well-known
3. JPEG and JPEG2000, photorealism over the Web
4. GIF vs. JPG