I'm working with Ocean Island's current designer, Mike, on the redesign of their site, and I'm thinking a lot about .jpg and .gif compression. I've started to think about what doesn't agree with compression algorithms.
Essentially, JPEG compression responds well to graphics with similar and photographic patterns. Graphics that contain a larger variation of random shapes end up with larger file sizes, the way that graphics with too wide a colour palette end up presenting troubles for .gif compression.
So here's some ideas:
Put together a layout that takes jpeg's good compression for colour-rich and smooth graphics, and gif's good compression for limited colour palettes, bizarre patterns, etc. And it'd be nice to do design that works with the compression artifacts that each present. Plus it'd be nice to understand PNG.
Yay!
PS
In addition, it'd be fun to put something together that takes advantage of all sorts of browser-specific functions, but that work independently of each-other, so it looks different in every browser, but good in all browsers. Take advantage of that weirdness. Perhaps there's sites that'd be good without usability concerns at all.
