Sub-pixel re-workings of YouTube and BBC favicons
typophile.com
typophile.com
I might get that for xemacs and annoy coworkers with 500-character long lines. "But they don't wrap on my screen!"
*
*
*
*
http://antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/sample_aria...
Each line shifts 0.1px to right. Taken from.
http://antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html
which is excellent introduction to subpixel rendering
Unfortunately, I have one of my LCDs rotated 90 degrees and, so, any sub-pixel smoothing fails miserably unless it accounts for the rotated sub-pixels.
Or we can get everyone to use RGB. Either would work.
In a everything-is-made-of-marshmallows ideal world, yeah, bandwidth is not an issue, nor is site load time, and client-side CPUs and RAM are infinite. In that world I too would transmit everything, no matter how minor, in vector form. We do not live in that world.
If you're worried more about the 15 bytes than about compatibility, then just have the logo scale up and use it for your main logo as well; it should actually save bandwidth that way.
I think that Apple does resolution independent icons by embedding several bitmap versions with a vector version in their icon files. That's the way to go in desktop applications, but similar system would produce too much overhead without significant advantage in web.
Not sure if image resizing could even make sensible use of sub-pixel rendering...
A smart browser showing the same page spread over two different monitors would then download twice as much, but everyone else would be happy.
This solution would pollute the HTML information space.
What's up with that? Can anyone find/give an explanation of this phenomenon?
EDIT: This guy Miha is amazing. Check out this tiny little font he is working on (go to nearly the bottom of the page for a more complete version):
Have you ever looked at someone silhouetted by a bright light, and noticed color fringing on the left and right sides? That's the reason (if you haven't, you have very good eyes). It's also something you often see on photos from cheap digital cameras, where it is introduced by cheap lenses shining onto tiny sensors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberration
Interestingly, if you look at the typophile page through a vertically-oriented prism, you'll see similar color fringing on both images - the giant red and white 'pixels' in authentic favicon will shift towards...yellow and purple. Make sure you are looking through the second rotation of the prism - the first rotation does not induce color fringing but reverses left and right instead.
edit: Also, someone should hire that guy, like now.
The color fringing is due to an effect similar to a diffraction grating. It's caused by light bending as it travels near an edge (like a prism makes a rainbow by bending light). Chromatic aberration exists, but has nothing to do with the color fringing.
The color fringes on the icon are clearer because an LCD monitor actually has 3 times as many pixels as the typical count. It has 3 pixels for each normal pixel: one for Red, Green, and Blue.
These images make use of that, to basically have 3 times the resolution of an ordinary image. So smaller details are now visible.
It doesn't work on CRT's (it actually looks worse). And it only works on LCD's if the order of the sub-pixels is the same as what the author expects.
It is true about the prismatic color-shifting, though - I have one on the desk so that was an observation rather than a hypothesis.
It's interesting and I wish s/he went into more details on how to do it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-pixel_rendering
And google it also, there are many sites that explain it, so I won't repeat them.
It only works on LCD's, and the order of the sub-pixels on your LCD has to match the authors.
There is an option you can set to tell your OS to use sub-pixels when anti-aliasing fonts.
Basically for each pixel, there are actually 3, one for each of red, green, blue. By using this, you can increase the horizontal resolution by a factor of three (more or less).
Horizontal resolution, because most LCD's have the three sub-pixels in a horizontal row.
"The technology is well-suited to LCDs and other technologies where each logical pixel corresponds directly to three independent colored sub-pixels, but less so for CRTs. In a CRT the light from the pixel components often spread across pixels, and the outputs of adjacent pixels are not perfectly independent. If a designer knew precisely a great deal about the display's electron beams and aperture grille, subpixel rendering might have some advantage. But the properties of the CRT components, coupled with the alignment variations that are part of the production process, make subpixel rendering less effective for these displays."
Depends on your screen, but mine has the colors in a triangle. This means that the same colors are not always on the same side of the pixel, so you can't use sub-pixel rendering (see the picture in the article, basically the green is first on the left, then on the right, and back and forth). If you have a Trinitron monitor it could work though.
The ones on the right appear as a blur of color.
Anti-aliased fonts always, similarly, look color-smudged to me, so I make sure to turn off that "feature" completely, whenever I can.
I suspect that, unlike some replies have implied, this isn't a defect in visual acuity (which could be the case, since the one eye I didn't bother to have laser surgery on is far from normally shaped), but, rather, an increase in sensor resolution. Might we have more cones? Perhaps our cones are distributed differently? Do we saccade [if you'll pardon the verbing] at a different frequency and/or to a different extent?
If my dominant eye can focus the image (unassisted now, with spectacles pre-surgery), I tend to prefer smaller font sizes, even on a tight pitch like a 17" 1920x1200. I still wish Apple would come out with a 15" laptop with 1200 vertical pixels.