Yes, I know all you web/graphic designers out there are probably guffawing in your chairs – “You haven’t been using PNG-24 – are you mad?!!”
Well, I’d seen it, sitting pretty in the file type drop down in the Save for Web dialog box and often thought “what on earth do people use that for?” whilst struggling with making colours transparent in the Colour Table, or making the background of my icon the same darned colour as the background it’s hovering over on the website. I’ve become a master at that I can tell you!
But alas my ‘eureka moment’ came just before Xmas, when I was creating an icon for the college intranet. I was following a tutorial to create a cool looking 3D mailbox icon in Illustrator, however when it came to the dreaded PNG-8 ‘choose colours to make transparent’ step in Photoshop, I mis-clicked and ended up saving as PNG-24. Only to find the finished file had – would you believe it – a smooth alpha channel drop shadow with no pixellation.
How many design-hours could this knowledge have saved me? I dread to think.
Well, I’ll hold up my hands and say I don’t know it all and I learned something new and really useful that day. Having been in this business for over 10 years now – that’s quite refreshing!