19.4. When to Use GIFs

GIF is a versatile format for condensing color images for use on the Web. It is particularly well suited for any image with areas of flat color, such as logos, line art, icons, cartoon-like illustrations, etc. (Figure 19-1). It compresses them cleanly (since it is a lossless compression) and efficiently (LZW compression looks for repetition of pixel colors). Even if the image contains some photographic elements, if the majority is flat colors, GIF is your best bet.

Figure 19-1. Examples of images well suited for GIF format