When Do You Use GIFs and When Do You Use JPEGs?
Visited 1041 Times Published by Rico August 1st, 2007 in Design, Philippines and When.I’ve seen so many designers drop the ball on this that it’s time to speak out: GIFs for solid-colored images and JPEGs for gradients and photos!
Witness the pixellation of my Lakbayan map saved as a JPEG:
And see this Philippine map double in size when saved as a GIF (22kb vs. 9kb as a JPEG):
Now you’ll probably tell me “But Rico, it isn’t as clear cut as that!” Fine! Just make sure your images take up little space and look clean. That’s the beauty of programs like Photoshop: you can experiment for best results.
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Wy do people still use GIF… isn’t PNG superior and universally supported?
Unfortunately not. Some older programs, including earlier versions of Explorer, can’t render PNGs.
But you’re still right: PNGs are superior to GIFs in every way. The cool transparency on the bottom bar of fortuito.us uses a PNG to achieve the effect.
For simple graphics, GIF is more than enough, especially if you have no need for the alpha transparency. Also, Photoshop by default outputs bloated PNGs, and I’m too lazy to bring out the PNG compressor. Hehehe.
PNG Compressor? For free?
Where?
Here’s one: pngcrush. It’s a command-line program so it’s not pretty. But if you have a large number of images, the default batch mode makes things fast.