“I use Google Analytics, and I noticed that their left nav has an interesting characteristic: instead of each option being boxed in a clickable rectangle, there is a one pixel notch in each corner. It’s not necessarily a curved corner, but it is a little softer than a normal box. I would’ve naturally thought that if someone is going to use background images to create a capsule effect, they would have used anti-aliased images. But upon closer inspection, no background images were used at all.”

“The below image looks like a simple gradient with my website’s name on it. But it’s more than that. There’s a picture hidden in that gradient. Can you find it?”

“Data charts and diagrams are used when statistical data has to be presented in the most convenient and usable way. Visual charts are clear, visually appealing and easier to perceive than some simple enumerations or tables — mainly because users don’t have to analyze the meaning of presented facts, but can perceive main tendencies through the visual weight of the facts — directly.

You can create charts in graphic editors or use special applications (software or web-apps) which can help you to create your charts in few minutes. However, once you’d like to update an old chart, or create a new one, you have to run the application and create new images over and over again. That’s not flexible. Or maybe you just want to offer your visitors not a simple image, but a powerful dynamic chart.”

Tim Bray: “Today I see, via John Gruber, that Pantone has been acquired by X-Rite. In 1995, I gave Pantone’s CEO some advice that might have made them a lot of money. He didn’t take it, but it’s an amusing story.”

“Scroll through yards of inspirational images. Share and contribute, see what you can do. Add a personal link to your submission or just engage anonymous. Be part of the longest visual website in the world!” (Note: Could have NSFW images…)

“Photographer Rob Galbraith reports that Apple’s newly released Safari 3 beta for Windows is color managed–bringing color management to Windows browsers for the first time. I never thought I’d say it, but this is great news. Now there’s a cross-platform way to present accurate color images on the Web. Check ‘ICC Profile’ in Photoshop’s Save for Web dialog to include the info needed for color management to do its thing.”

“In the thirteen years I’ve been on the web, twelve of which I’ve spent doing professional web site design, and the last two of which have sent me to hundreds of artists’ web sites, I’ve come to the inevitable conclusion that the thing artists want most when placing their art on the web is for it not to be seen.” (Thanks Coudal Partners!)

“When designing web applications, icons and images are used to enhance the user experience, give visual cues, and simply look sexy. For complex web apps, the quantity and resulting latency of icons and images used can greatly impact page load times…and developers, in most cases, generally try to reduce page load time with a sweet web app rather than increase it. To reduce latency in my apps, I use Image Concatenation! …The basic idea is this: Change X number of image downloads to 1 image download by making 1 big image that contains the X images.”

“This tutorial will show you a way to easily create a pixelated mosaic-type effect for use on edges or borders or whatever you want. I first noticed this effect with the (animated) launch of the new Iconfactory website. I was later browsing through my normal list of bookmarked sites and noticed that SimpleBits has been doing the same thing for a while now. It’s a pretty neat effect that can be recreated with a few filters and adjustment layers.”

“Microsoft’s new Windows Media Photo image format specification is finally seeing the light of day. The software company began lobbying for WMPhoto to replace the JPEG image format this week at WindowsHEC in Seattle. Microsoft has taken the image compression spec out of development and has labeled it as a final release. There is also word that MS is keeping the standard totally free, but licensing details are still being worked out.”

“We were curious about the graphics featured on CBSNews.com, so we approached James Morris, a senior designer on the site, to give us a little insight into the thinking that goes into their creation. James was kind enough to write a piece for us about the challenges, politics and ethical considerations that go into crafting images for CBSNews.com. It’s a refreshingly honest peek into the decisions that go into creating the graphics that show up on the site.”

“As an amateur photographer, I’ve been looking for practical ways to display my work as well as protect them from potential copyright infringement. There are a hundred ways to superimpose a watermark on an image, but this requires a process of doing that to each of your images before you place them on your website. Being the lazy fellow that I am, I was seeking a way for this to occur on-the-fly without me having to do anything…”

“A single picture element (a ‘pixel’) of an LCD screen is actually composed of three ’sub-pixels’: one red, one green, and one blue (R-G-B). Taken together this sub-pixel triplet makes up what we’ve traditionally thought of as a single pixel… So: This means that if we were to treat the actual sub-pixels individually — ignoring their differing colors for the moment — we would have three times the horizontal resolution from our existing LCD display panels!”

“What is almost endless lossless data compression? Implode (coding) a long code (input data) in a short key code (output data). Explode (decoding) the short key code back in the original long code. It’s not allowed that two different long codes generate the same short key code.”

“What is this? It’s a simple web application where you can easily create transparent PNG images. These can be used to create cool effects in a variety of ways. This application produces only rectangular images, so I suspect it will be used mostly for web page background images, but use it for whatever you like.”