Web Development - Images and Backgrounds

Watch Anti-Aliasing When Changing Background Colors

Anti-aliasing is great - instead of seeing jagged edges, paint programs supporting this feature fake the eye into seeing a smooth transition between colors by using faded variations of the edge colors. This can be a blessing and a curse, though. If you design a transparent graphic that has anti-aliased borders, be careful when you first decide on the graphic's transparent color (the same as the background color). If the webpage has a different background color as the transparent graphic's transparent/background color, you could have a lot of re-touching to do.

When the anti-aliasing effect chooses the border colors between an object on a graphic and the background color, the paint program will choose border colors that use variations of the object color and the background color. This is not a problem if the transparent 'color' is chosen wisely as the same color of a web page's background, but if the colors are drastically different, the transparent graphic will tend to have an unsightly edge that will have to be corrected.

The moral of this story - do some planning before you design your graphics. Plan out the colors beforehand. Or, you could decide not to use anti-aliasing.

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