10ª Bienal da ADG

Estão abertas até o dia 15 de fevereiro as inscrições para a "Bienal Brasileira de Design Gráfico". Esta décima edição do evento promovido pela ADG Brasil (Associação dos Designers Gráficos do Brasil) visa promover um mapeamento da produção nacional de design, refletindo e revelando diferentes perspectivas, novas fronteiras e, especialmente, as mudanças pelas quais o Brasil e o mundo passam. Os projetos devem obrigatoriamente ter sido implementados, produzidos ou veiculados, exceto no caso de trabalhos de graduação de estudantes, e poderão ser inscritos em oito categorias: "Identidade & Branding", "Impressos editoriais", "Impressos promocionais", "Digital", "Espacial", "Embalagens", "Tipografia" e "Fronteiras". Cada categoria se subdivide em diferentes subcategorias. As inscrições serão feitas exclusivamente pelo site. Os participantes devem enviar até 10 imagens para cada produto inscrito e a inscrição poderá também ser complementada com vídeo de até 1 minuto de duração, on-line nos sites especificados. 

A taxa de inscrição é R$ 150,00 por cada trabalho inscrito, sendo que sócios da ADG podem inscrever gratuitamente dois trabalhos e membros profissionais de associações parceiras têm desconto de 20% na inscrição dos primeiros dois trabalhos. Mais informações, regulamento e inscrições no site: www.bienaladg.org.br.

The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF

PNG is now the most popular lossless image compression format on the web. Only the lossy JPEG, which is the most appropriate format for photographs, is used on more sites.

While GIF's patent issues mentioned above are long resolved, it's the technical superiority that now convinces webmasters to chose PNG over GIF. PNG results in smaller files most of the time, it supports a much wider range of color depths and transparency options. The only feature where GIF still shines is its support for animation. However, most people find that dancing icons on a website make it look like it hasn't been redesigned in the last 15 years. Animation is mostly used for ads nowadays, and even there, animated GIF's would be considered the poor mans alternative to Flash.

Interestingly, GIF is still more popular than PNG on the top 1,000 websites (67.9% vs. 66.3%, see our head-to-head comparison), but we can expect that to change also within the next months. The trend is very clear: for every site that changes from PNG to GIF, more than 3 sites make the change in the other direction, see our technology change report.

There are some remarkable geographical differences in the usage rate of PNG: it is very popular in Europe, with over 70% in France, Italy, Spain and Netherlands, but much less in Asia, with 41% in Japan, 34.6% in Korea and only 30.6% in China. Usage is also higher on Unix-like systems than on Windows, and Google seems to be a big PNG supporter, it is used on 95.6% of all Google Servers.

The GIF image format, originally developed by CompuServe more than 25 years ago, was a very important standard in the early days of the web. It will probably be around for another 25 years, but it has been dethroned today.

PNG is now used on 62.4% of all websites, just ahead of GIF with 62.3%. GIF was leading by more than 15% one year ago.