A single image can tell a full story that even a thousand words can’t. Online world is fully loaded with graphics. Graphics are used in various forms like banner, header and footer, button, menu bar, borders, boxes, ecovers, etc. What are the image formats that are chosen for web design?

Here is a list of the image formats that you can use for web design:

GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) images: This is the file format that can make animation on web browsers. You can make banners, buttons and cool cartoons with GIF graphics. GIF images supports 256 colors. They can show all images properly except photographs. These images are natural choice for animated banners and graphics. GIF image can be kept transparent with the background. The interlacing property of GIF image allows to load faster on web pages.

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) images: These images support 16.7 million colors although not all the colors can be shown properly on web browsers. Amazing gradient colors, shadows, vignettes can be applied on JPEG graphics. You can lower or make higher the quality of JPEG image for your use. The standard quality for JPEG image is 60-80% web publishing as per Abobe Photoshop option. Lesser the image quality, smaller is the size of JPEG image. There is another version of JPEG images, known as progressive JPEG. Such image format is introduced to quickly load JPEG images from servers to browsers.

JPEG images should be used in graphics where colors used are beyond default 256 colors or for photographs.

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) images: The PNG files were developed to work better than GIF images. They are good for fast loading on web page. Transparency property can be kept in case of PNG images. PNG image has the facility to use greater depth of colors. Maximum color depth can be 24-bit. In future web development, PNG image will play a greater role. However, no animation can be done with PNG image.

BMP (Bit Map) images: BMP image is one of the default Microsoft Windows image file formats. They are formed by rectangular data structures called Pixels. BMP files take larger space on server and disk than JPEG and PNG files. If you increase a bitmap image’s size, you will loose picture quality. Due to their large size, bitmap images are used very less in Web graphics.

These are the standard web graphics format used on the web.

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