Introduction

Basic Design Elements

Overview
Column Width
Backgrounds
Logos
Fonts
Images
Sounds
Hyperlinks

Site Elements

Clients

Images

The Internet is primarily a visual medium, so images are very important. On the other hand, images take longer to load than text does, especially if the user is on dial-up or slow internet service. It's best, then, to keep images fairly small, both in size and in resolution. (Most digital cameras will record images that are several megabytes in size, but most images used online are a hundred times smaller.) Clients generally furnish some or all of the images needed to promote their business, in a variety of forms, including photos and print images. I can convert most any image form to a JPEG, which is one of the most commonly used image formats on the internet. The logo at the top of this page is a JPEG and only requires 20 kilobytes of storage and thus has a very quick download time. Most browsers store images in a temporary internet file, so once the image is downloaded, it can be used elsewhere on the site without having to download it again.

Of course, images come in a variety of degrees of quality. In order to standardize and improve images, I use Photoshop to manipulate the elements of the image. Below left is an image of my great-grandparents and their children, taken around 1900:

Obviously, the original picture has very little contrast and the color is skewed. But on the right, just a few simple corrections reveal details that were lost in the original print. Photoshop allows for considerably more drastic changes to images, though. The images below, of a music store in Colorado Springs, had to be taken on a cloudy day when there was a truck parked in front of the building next door, limiting the way the shot could be framed:

Using Photoshop, I can readjust the brightness and contrast, correct the perspective, relight the storefront, and add some blue sky. The result is a much more appealing store front.

Sometimes what's needed is not a better image but just a closer look. This was the case for my client Teresa Meister, a bead artist from Colorado Springs. A view that enables the user to see the entire finished work is too small to reveal much detail. So I provided a way to get a closer look. Simply double click on the image at right to see a magnified view of a typical portion of the necklace. A single click returns the image to the original view.

One limitation of JPEGs is that they are static. The logo I created for my friends The Mitguards incorporated a snake, which was fine for the cover of their album Nobody's Fool. But when I created a website for them, it seemed a shame to have just a dead snake. So using another image format called a gif, I animated the snake so that the tail and the tongue wiggle and the colors of the body continually change. Another quality that gifs have is that they can incorporate transparency, which is handy when superimposing a logo against a background, for instance.

Animations aren't restricted to gifs, however. For an example of the kinds of animations web pages can contain, check out the home page of The Mitguards.