Comments on: good versus evil

By: marisa

marisa — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 15:36:48 +0000

PS Nice use of the word “crusade” in the Good vs. Evil thread, Tom!!!

By: marisa

marisa — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 15:36:05 +0000

Haha. No need to apologize! We just have different approaches. Mine is, perhaps, a bit more sloppy. :)

By: tom moody

tom moody — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 15:07:43 +0000

But here we’re not talking about just “people”
or “machines” but the premiere computer, supposedly, for visual artists and designers. I remake GIFs larger sizes, too, thanks largely to Apple.

I will continue to try to pop their bubble wherever possible–sorry for bringing my crusade to your post, but I am a zealot on this topic.

By: marisa

marisa — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 13:44:20 +0000

You know, none of this stuff really bothers me. A long time ago I used to make site-specific installations meant to be trompled on and break-down, and before that I made prints. (Actually, I’ve returned to this, recently.) Both experiences taught me to appreciate the conditions of a work’s production and presentation. Printing processes bring things to the image that you didn’t, except in the sense that you exposed it to that process. There are things you can do to try to ‘correct’ for this, but I rarely do because I like being open to this element. The same is true with the gifs. I could resize & manipulate them myself, but it’s not so important for me to control the image. These were not my images, in the first place…… I only blew them up so people could see them better. I like that different software, browsers, etc, bring different things to the image. I’ve always believed that once you put a work out into the world, people will interpret it however they want. There is no right or wrong answer, regardless of what you intended. I guess the same is true for machines’ interpretations.

By: tom moody

tom moody — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 13:00:37 +0000

They are treating all image file types as being equal. It’s a styling thing–like that slight extra beveling on the trim of a car or slightly higher grade of plastic that says “this is a classy product.” Problem is “the Net” is its own product and they are altering other people’s content.

Obnoxious as Windows is you can opt for “Windows classic”–a stripped down browser styling without the font smoothing, drop shadows, etc–and you can turn off most of the defaults. And for whatever reason it reads GIFs accurately, even though the Internet Explorer browser and Front Page were (or are still–I don’t know) bad about interpreting HMTL specifications.

One thing IE ignores is animated GIF speed. It won’t play them higher than 10 frames a second.

By: guthrie

guthrie — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 21:39:44 +0000

i dont know when anti-aliasing gifs would ever be a good thing (for any gifs ive ever seen)? its pretty stupid

By: tom moody

tom moody — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 22:45:21 +0000

Or I should say “multiple identical animated GIFs.”

By: tom moody

tom moody — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 22:43:41 +0000

This is my new, standard disclaimer for my animation log:

Animations “scaled up” in HTML may appear fuzzier than intended on Macintosh computers, due to a design flaw–evidently anti-aliasing software to reduce “jaggies,” whether such filtering is desired or not; the Safari browser also loads multiple animated GIFs out of sync, which sucks.

I believe it is accurate that Firefox on Mac will play GIFs in synch, but not Safari.

By: tom moody

tom moody — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 18:40:46 +0000

These are great, Marisa. Guthrie brought an issue up in an email and I think it's worth ridiculing Macintosh one more time for "artistically" fuzzing out enlarged GIFs like this. See this post of mine from a few years ago. These should be supersharp pixels but I'm guessing they're "anti-aliased" on Mac into a state of tasteful blurriness. Am I wrong?

By: marisa

marisa — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 13:34:33 +0000

yep. with a halo! :)