[cello-devel] cello web page survey

[Thomas F. Burdick]

Kenny Tilton writes:
 > Ok, tonight is web page night (taking a break from getting my ass licked 
 > by opengl vertex culling). I want to make the info as useful as possible 
 > to folks, so I thought it might be fun to hear what interested you 
 > enough in Cello to sign up for this list.
 > 
 > Meanwhile, can I get some guidance on how to create effective graphics 
 > for a web page?

For the general case, it takes a book to answer that question ;-)

 > GIF? JPEG? Doesn't matter?

GIFs are lossless, JPEGs are lossy.  JPEGs therefore tend to be
smaller, but they can be fuzzy, if you overcompress them.  Keep your
image in a lossless format, and think of saving to JPEG as exporting.

For fast loading, you want to have your graphics use as few colors as
possible, but no fewer.  Good thumbnails are usually made by a
combination of cropping, scaling, and often filtering.

 > Dimensions? Suppose I want at least one shot to look good right in the 
 > page, without forcing them to view it separately at full size?

Then try to keep it at no more than 400px for each dimension.  If it's
not too crowded of an image, it could be carefully scaled down.  Or
just pick out the interesting parts and crop.

I have a copy of the Gimp here, so if you reach your limit of comfort
with graphics manipulation, I can finish them.  Just send me something
lossless (eg TIFF or GIF).  When you zip it all up, if it's > 10-12
MB, FTP it to common-lisp.net.