Curse

Duality · Apr 20, 2005, 10:05 PM // 22:05

posting for my fiance. he and a few others got laid off at his work. i suppose i should note that his job was graphic design.

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A lot of guilds, I've noticed, are fanatical about their guild websites. Given how amazing some of them look, I'd say it's very much deserved. Well, duality and I are getting started on our own guild website (a bit late, but what can I say?) and I came up with this, which I think looks pretty badass:

I'll be more than happy to create one for any guild that wants one. The caveat is, I'm recently jobless and very much broke, so I'm charging ten bucks for each one.

That said, I can customize them to look identical to your guild's ingame cape given a picture. I can produce them in any size from 1000 (wide) by 1200 (high) to as small as you want at Web-standard 72dpi. These are JPEG images, because even at 256 colours a PNG or GIF will still look grainy, so they do NOT come on transparent backgrounds. However, given any RGB/CMYK value, I can match its background to your site's.

If you're interested, email kizayaen at gmail dot com.

Xapti · Apr 21, 2005, 04:48 AM // 04:48

What about using 16-bit PNGs instead of 8-bit PNGs...

I find PNGs may be about 20-60% larger than JPEGs, but offer a much crisper image.

BTW, nice stuff.

Duality · Apr 21, 2005, 05:40 AM // 05:40

he says:

The idea is not without merit.

However, Photoshop doesn't support 16bit PNGs, just 24bit. The jpegs I'm creating come in at around 41kb each; a 24bit PNG of the same thing weighs in at roughly 117kb for the same size, which is Just Too Big. 41kb is already very large in terms of web design; most websites I've built try to use less than that as an upper bound for entire pages. There's no justification whatsoever for an image three times as large.

PNGs DO usually come out looking nicer, and when it's feasible I do use them in preference to jpegs. However, the less you compress your jpeg, the less of an issue that is... as might be inferred by the large filesize, compression on these pieces is minimal.

The other problem with transparencies is that Safari, Internet Explorer, and possibly Opera don't read them correctly. They make assumptions for gamma correction which aren't true because there's no colour data there at all, and thus you end up with a grey or light beige background which is equally non-transparent. (Hint hint hint... get Firefox.)

Though I suppose if it's your ten bucks and you want a 117k png with transparency... well, it's your ten bucks.

Fam · Apr 22, 2005, 02:04 PM // 14:04

If I were buying a Guild Crest, I would much prefer a PNG version at highest quality, with transparencies. Then you could resave and compress to any resolution. All major browsers support transparency in PNG images apart from Internet Explorer (and even then, there are simple ways of making IE display them correctly). Give them a compresses JPEG and a 24-bit PNG. Theres no reason why you couldn't.

Good luck finding a job though. Its a tricky business.

Duality · Apr 23, 2005, 12:03 AM // 00:03

a reply from him, because i can't strongarm him to get his own account ;P
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1. yes, all browsers support transparencies. as noted above, 3 of 4 major browsers support them buggily, and there is no simple way to make ie work with them properly. you could maybe tweak -your- ie, but that wouldn't help the other 99% of ie's market share.

2. i already said that i'd give them a 24bit png if that's what they wanted.

3. there is no 'png at highest quality', only jpeg uses 'quality' settings, and that's an inverse name for compression. the higher the quality, the lower the compression. 24bit pngs don't even have any settings for the colour palette - it's assumed that if you want a 24bit image, you obviously care a lot more about colour than size.

kizayaen · Apr 23, 2005, 12:22 AM // 00:22

Alright - finally got my own account so as to spare poor Duality the messenger-girl schtick.

Clarification, because it may have been misinterpreted - if somebody wants a jpeg AND a 24-bit (or 8-bit, whatever) png, that's fine. You're the theoretical paying customer, and I'm the person with 24 hours a day in free time. I'm not going to begrudge you an extra forty-five seconds of "save image for web" time. Hell, you want a .tiff too? The original full-sized .psd? A .bmp for your Windows background, preset for optimal display 1280x1024? A gif, because .pngs are new technology and that scares you? You're the boss, Boss. About the only image format I won't offer is something in vector-format like .ai, because at that point the workload goes up by a factor of n, where n is a two-digit number of days.

The other two points, I believe, stand fairly well on their own.

Delil Isiorion · May 10, 2005, 05:19 PM // 17:19

As a personal critique from one graphic artist to another.. the shield is pretty nice looking, but it looks like you fleshed out the shield in vector, took the edges, run it through the Eyecandy 4000 Chrome filter, took the little dragon line work, ran it through the emboss filter, and centered it.

Personally, I don't use filters, at all. Everything in the end looks much better, and much more realistic if painted/illustrated by hand. I'm having a difficult time figuring out the real angle of your composition. Are you trying to go for realistic, more vector-type graphic illustration, or a combo of both? I would say you should either go with one, or the other. If you're doing vector, get rid of the filters, and use gradient meshes instead. If you're doing rasted images, Go all out and actually paint the shield edging, and give some bit of volume through use of chairscuro and blending.

A good reference for you to look at is right here on this site. Look at the Guild Wars Guru shield. Even though it's still not really 'realistic' becuase the edges are 'too' perfect, and the light source seems confused, There is a great amount of realistic, volumetric form to it; also, the color scheme works very well to give that illustionistic feeling of a metalic material.

All in all, it's not 'bad', but I think it could use some work. Once you actually figure out what your website design will be based on mainly, you can decide just exactly what the apperance should be. If it's built up in CSS and Tables, then maybe vector is the way to go, if it's going to be mostly images, like the Guild Wars Guru site, then you want to go more naturalistic. Either way, Good luck with the whole job situation, what always helped me was having a kick-ass portfolio of all your best work to display, business cards with a link to your online-portfolio, and by doing small-crummy jobs for people with good connections to spread by word of mouth.

-delil