I ranted about crappy sup­plied cre­atives a lit­tle while back, and I’m doing so again.

Only this time it’s clue­less mar­ket­ing peo­ple, not graphic design­ers. The prob­lem is they’re not even both­er­ing to ASK for qual­ity. If I get another badly com­pressed JPEG or GIF image too soon, I might just go com­pletely postal in the gen­eral direc­tion of the per­son respon­si­ble. So what, it’s the web/video? Video, in case peo­ple hadn’t noticed, isn’t exactly low-resolution any­more (even if you’re broad­cast­ing in, erm, “pre­tend HD”) so it’s hardly as though a 200 pixel-wide GIF image is always going to suf­fice there, either.

Irre­spec­tive of how crappy your broad­cast com­pres­sion is, the qual­ity of some JPEGs that come through is infi­nitely worse.

This isn’t just me being a purist. It costs real time. Every time I cre­ate some­thing that uses one of these mon­sters, I’ll prob­a­bly spend at least half my time clean­ing up the crap. Why? Because I’m about to com­press it again and it’s impos­si­ble to edit loss­lessly, so even if it looks accept­able in Pho­to­shop, if I’m going to get it con­sis­tent with the rest of the graphic and/or com­press to a rea­son­able level, it’s going to suf­fer. Bleh.

Peo­ple are stu­pid. Vec­tor for­mats aren’t that hard. They’re eas­ier, it’s so much harder to break a vec­tor graphic. I’ve tried using Illus­tra­tor to trace logos in stu­pid for­mats in the past, and that works quite well. Just that my PC at work has a pathetic moth­er­board, and so I can’t have Hyper­Thread­ing enabled or it con­stantly crashes (yeah, tried new BIOS, etc. No luck.). And so Illus­tra­tor is nearly impos­si­ble to use, feel­ing heav­ier most of the time than Pho­to­shop does.

I love com­ing home and cre­at­ing things for here. Fir­ing up the GIMP in about 5 sec­onds, launch­ing Inkscape instantly. Open-source rocks.

Mmm rant quota filled for a cou­ple of days. I feel bet­ter now.

Tags: GIF, JPEG, using Illustrator, web/video