Hot Topic Spring Collection & I learned a new skill!!

Hi Jessica

I love your new spring line! I’m very excited to see them in Hot Topic stores! 🙂

And to answer your question regarding saving “.gif”. I’ve been making animated gif banner ads for more than 5 years, and they can be extremely frustrating to optimize (without looking too bad or pixelated)! Unfortunately animated gifs only use a maximum of 256 colors. Where as jpg files and png’s use 16 million colours (perfect for photographs). But unfortunately jpg’s and png’s can’t be animated 🙁 So because the images you’re using are mostly photographs, they’re only using 256 colours from the gif pallet. The pixelation you see is called “dithering”.

I’d recommend for an animation with lots of photographs and gradients to export as a flash animation instead (.swf) to keep the perfect photograph quality. Are you using Adobe Flash to make your animation? If you click the “Publish” button in the file menu it should automatically generate a .swf for you. This is what I would suggest to my clients if they required a banner with heavy gradients and photographs. Animated gifs are more for text and vector objects (that use minimal colours). It doesn’t work so well for photographs 🙁

I’m really bad at explaining things without sounding too nerdy or making someone even more confused… So I hope that made some sense and help answers your question. I guess it’s a bit late now since the topic was posted on March 16th… 😐