Operation Manual

50 Working with Graphics, Animation, and Multimedia
♦ Avoid blocky, rectangular shapes, which tend to make the page
look closed, static, and amateurish. Rounder and softer-edged
images tend to open up the page.
♦ Include graphic effects that combine hard-edge and soft-edge; drop
shadows are a good example.
The soft-edge effect known as anti-aliasing is one of the basic tricks of
the computer graphics artist. The effect gets rid of “jaggies” along
edges by subtly applying intermediate colors. To the human eye, anti-
aliased text on-screen (especially at larger point sizes) appears of
higher quality than text without the effect. In general, always use anti-
aliasing for your graphics and headline text, unless the image contains
only straight lines, edges, and outlines.
As shown in the illustration below, your design can include page
elements that blend with master page elements. These might include
portions of a logo, header, navigation bar, and so on. Fortunately, with
HTML 4.0 you can overlay one object on top of another and not have
to worry about overlap. You’ll still need to zoom in closely and adjust
the objects on one or both layers to achieve precise registration.
Choosing the proper format and settings for Web images is vital.
WebPlus relies on global settings to determine how each type of picture
should be exported when you publish the site. By default, any image
you inserted as a GIF or JPEG is exported as the original file, using its
original file name. All other graphics are converted to JPEGs.
If you wish, you can alter these global settings (on the Graphics tab of
File/Web Site Properties...), and you can always use the Web
Picture Properties Wizard (Web Picture Manager from the Tools
menu) to change the export settings for individual images. The Wizard
lets you check just one selected image, a range of pages, or the whole
publication. For each image, you can specify the output format: .GIF,
.JPG, .PNG, or Global Settings.