Why don’t web graphics work in print?
This is a multi-faceted question that requires some knowledge of both mediums. The short answer would be that web graphics are of a lower quality than graphics intended for print. A longer, more detailed explanation would be that the file formats used in web design are made expressly for delivering smaller file sizes that can be understood by many browsers across many platforms, by reducing color gamut, utilizing compression schemes that resample an image to discard areas of the image that are “similar,” and almost always they have a lower resolution than graphics intended for commercial printing. A very good example of this is the GIF format, which reduces the color gamut of an image drastically by discarding entire ranges of colors that are not within a predefined table of colors allowed in the image. This “indexed” color range, which is limited to 256 colors max, simulates the discarded colors by combining dots of the allowed colors. Indexed color images are of very poor quality, an
