Chapter 23: Prepare Illustrations for the Web

Vector Art in a Still ( Mainly )  Raster  World

Once you have created your web artwork, you face an interesting challenge in presenting your Illustrator artwork on the Web. The Web is (mainly) a raster environment, while Illustrator excels at vector-based images. The basic problem is that the Web displays artwork with a limited set of colors on grainy, low-resolution monitors and, for the most part, without scalable graphics.

Illustrator helps you meet this challenge with the Save for Web dialog box. Here you can experiment with different file formats, tweak how coloring is managed, and even assign different attributes to different slices (selected areas) of an illustration.

Web browsers usually support two image file formats: GIF (the G is pronounced either as in get or as in gee ) and JPEG ( jay-peg ). A third widely interpreted web graphic file format, the PNG ( ping ) format, is similar to GIF.