Tohir Solomons

The Case for PNG

Posted on the April 18th, 2005 under Uncategorized by Tohir

Today at work, I have the unenviable task of working with icons. You are given a small block (20×20 pixels) to depict an idea and concept – and believe me, its tough. Fortunately, I’m not responsible for creating the icons – thats the graphic designer’s role!

My task is to help export them from Corel Draw in a ‘least distorted’ view because big they look brilliant, small can be unrecognizable. Fortunately, we managed to persuade the team to try the icons in PNG format.

To be honest, I wasn’t a ‘fan’ of PNG, and came to “know” via Fireworks that you have PNG 8 and PNG 24 which behaved much like GIF and JPEG respectively. It is only when I got introduced to what Fireworks calls PNG 32 that I began to be impressed.

Why PNG?

PNG supports transparency like GIF. But like JPG, you can have transparency in 24bit pictures. The mistake I made was to confuse the fact that in GIF, one colour is allocated to be transparent, and I thought the same was the case with PNG.

I was wrong! In PNG, you are allowed to have various colours of transparency – in lay man’s terms, so you need not bother with what colour your matte is. Technically, it is called the Alpha Layer.

So this is the huge interest in PNG. You have a 24 bit image, with transparency, and without the need to specify a matte colour.

PNG and Internet Explorer

PNG is wonderful, but seemingly discouraged because PNG Alpha transparency is not currently supported in Internet Explorer, without additional coding.

Microsoft points to a style that needs to be added to PNG images. The good news is that there are JavaScript workarounds for this. Simply Google for IE PNG to get some websites. My personal favourite is http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/.

Simply include, and experience the magic of PNG.