Anandtech main site link looks weird

[dennilfloss]

OK. I use IE 5.5 and my background colour is red. Yesterday the image link to Anandtech.com incorporated a nice white rectangle. Today, it (logo_white.gif) seems to have become like a transparent gif with some ugly white speckling around the letters. That speckling probably wouldn't show on a white background, but on a coloured background it becomes obvious, ugly and makes it near impossible to read what is written in small letters under Anandtech. I can barely make out -computers something discussion forums.

Anyone else having this problem?

 

[Digobick]

Clearing your browser's cache should solve it....

 

[dennilfloss]

That did not help me. The logo banner is still ugly enough to give me a headache.

 

[Digobick]

Hmm, maybe it's a permanent change now? I'm using the default colors so I really hadn't noticed a difference until now.

 

[Zorba]

I have a black background, and if it weren't for the speckling I wouldn't even be able to read the 'AnandTech' part. And I have no idea what it says under that, just a bunch of white dots.

 

[arcain]

The reason for this is that the logo now uses a transparent background. However the logo was originally made with a white background, and used antialiasing (to smooth edges, getting rid of the "staircase" effect, using intermediate colors between the different edge colors, in this case shades of gray). Because the transparency only effects one color (the true white of the background) the antialiased pixels do not show as transparent and remain. This is what causes the white speckling.

Solutions to this is to make a logo .gif using each background color (unlikely because you can choose your own custom color). Or not us anti-aliasing.. which would make the smaller text (the speckles underneath that are difficult to read) unglier.

 

[Howard]

arcain, in Photoshop you can select multiple colours for transparency. So when you open the image, more than one colour can be invisible against the background.

BTW, it can only be done when you open a GIF and export as GIF.

 

[arcain]

Yucky,

That may be the case within Photoshop, but upon exportation into a GIF file, only one palette entry will be transparent. GIFs are limited to 256 colors, only one of them can represent transparency. I suspect if you select multiple colors to be transparent and export to GIF, Photoshop will assign them to be the one transparent entry.

However this does not solve the problem of using antialiasing and using a transparent background. If they would like to use antialiasing on a user definable background, there only real choice would be to do it programatically, while caching the more commonly used background options.