Crush graphics

Crush graphics

Many of my web application prototypes goes with more whitespace based, findability oriented liquid CSS layouts. But there's no way that I can ignore branding graphics & supportive graphics in the layout which adds more visual liveliness. Challenge is not to make the layout heavy to eye balls as well as to browsers. So question lingers now...

Which is the best graphic image format for web ?

I would say, .png format. An Open, Extensible Lossless Compression image format. Specially rounded corners or thin graphic lines are fad in current design trend. To fasten browser rendering without using heavy graphical images: PNG has an edge. But Internet Explorer have issues with PNGs as background graphics and tends to render them darker than they should be. This is because internal comments and data that is not necessary, including gamma information. Removing the gamma data ends up solving this problem by making .PNG file lighter & browser friendly.

Since I've moved most of graphical elements to portable network graphics format, Fireworks does the neat job of removing redundant or unnecessary data in it, but individually. I was looking out for something which could batch render this kind of work. I found Benjamin's PNGGauntlet -a user friendly .net based tool which does the job of compressing my PNG's neatly. Best of all is its a freeware !

Many PNG files output by popular graphics software packages like Photoshop or even Fireworks are not as small as they could be - PNGGauntlet squeezes the last bit of size out of them. PNGGauntlet also supports a brute-force option that will try different PNGOut settings in order to create the smallest file.

>> Benjamin's PNGGauntlet

There're few freewares to do this task : pngcrus