Taking Your Talent to the Web

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You should avoid gradient background images anyway because they will dither horribly on 256-color monitors, don’t render properly in the GIF format, and if exported as JPEGs cannot be web-safe.

And you should avoid busy random textured backgrounds as well because they are generally hideous, and they make text harder to read. Even beautiful pages developed with subtle background tiles are not much use if no one can read the text they contain.

The PNG format mentioned earlier offers real transparency, which means a PNG image could be used against any type of web background without ill effect. But the trouble with PNG is…well, we’ve covered that to death already.

Specifying Anti-Aliasing for Type

Anti-aliasing options in Photoshop and ImageReady allow you to choose from three levels of anti-aliasing to modify the appearance of type online. You can choose to make type appear crisper, smoother, or heavier.

Exercise 6: Shape Up—Sizes and Faces

Create a new type layer by typing in a new, blank Photoshop document.

In the Type Tool dialog box, select an anti-aliasing option from the pop-up menu. Choose:

■None to apply no anti-aliasing. Useful for bitmapped fonts such as Joe Gillespie’s Mini 7 (www.wpdfd.com/mini7.htm), Jason Kottke’s Silkscreen (www.kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/), or the Fountain Type Foundry’s Sevenet (www.fountain.nu).

■Crisp to make type appear sharp. This is the default setting. It renders well and uses less bandwidth than Strong or Smooth.

■Strong to make type appear heavier. This is an impressive setting, but because it requires additional anti-aliasing to create its effect, it fights the LZW compression algorithm and results in larger file sizes. We are talking about very small differences here, but these differences do add up.

■Smooth to make type appear, well, smoother.