Hour7.Creating Your Own Web Page Graphics

Hour 7. Creating Your Own Web Page Graphics

You don't have to be an artist to put high-impact graphics and creative type on your web pages. You don't need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on software, either. This hour tells you how to create the images you need in order to make visually exciting web pages. Although the sample figures in this chapter use a popular Windows graphics program (Paint Shop Pro from Corel), you can easily follow along with any major Windows or Macintosh graphics application.

This hour is concerned only with creating the graphics files for web images, so it doesn't discuss HTML tags at all. In Hour 8, "Putting Graphics on a Web Page," you'll see how to integrate your graphics with your HTML pages.

Did you Know?

One of the best ways to save time creating the graphics and media files for web pages is, of course, to avoid creating them altogether. Grabbing a graphic from any web page is as simple as right-clicking it (or holding down the button, on a Macintosh mouse) and selecting Save Image As in Mozilla Firefox or Save Picture As in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Extracting a background image from a page is just as easy: Right-click it and select Save Background As.

You may also want to consider royalty-free clip art, which doesn't require you to get copyright permission. A good source of clip art online is Microsoft's Office Online Clip Art and Media web site, which is located at http://office.microsoft.com/clipart/. Barry's Clipart Server is another popular clip art destination, located at http://www.barrysclipart.com/.

Watch Out!

Any image or media clip you see on any web site is instantly reusable provided that the copyright holder grants (or sells) you the right to copy it. Be sure to ask before using any copyrighted media on your own pages. To learn more about copyrights as they apply to images on the Web, visit http://www.2learn.ca/copyright/images.html. Along with potentially getting you in a lot of legal trouble, taking images without permission is considered highly unprofessional, not to mention unethical.