More on supplied graphics for the web
05 May 2006I 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.