In typical 'you never get something for nothing' fashion, the greatest asset of a jpg image is also its greatest downfall. Most people know that a jpg image is a compressed image, which means that it has been compressed using an algorithm that makes the file size smaller. This can be a huge advantage when trying to transfer the image electronically, which is what you're doing every time someone looks at your webpage. Some people know that the method used to create jpg images is what is called a 'lossy' compression algorithm, which means the image you end up isn't quite the same as the image you started out with. What a lot of people don't know is that every time you save a jpg image you decrease the quality of that image, which can be a real problem if you don't pay attention to what you're doing.

So, you're hanging out on your back porch, minding your own business, eating your surstromming and drinking a sarsaparilla when all of a sudden out of the blue this UFO goes wizzen' over your head. So, being the quick-thinking entrepreneur that you are you whip out your cell phone camera, snap a few pictures and say to yourself 'I'm gonna be rich! All I need to do is pull these pictures into my computer, blow them up like they do on CSI, put them on my website and the world will beat a path to my door!'. (To all of you outside of the US this might seem a little strange, but believe me this is a fairly common occurrence here in the states).

So you fire up your copy of Photoshop, open the picture and enlarge it 1600%. 'Hey, what the?!!? Where did the UFO go? All I've got is a bunch of square blotches, I can't make anything out'. Well, let's take a look and see what happened, but first you had better go cancel your order for that new Porsche.

A font is simply the typeface that you use in your document. Just about everything you create on your computer allows you to select the font, or typeface to use. A complete discussion on typography is well beyond what we want to tackle here, there are plenty of books written on the subject if you're interested. What we'll do with our discussion (as we do with most things), is boil it down to a gross over-simplification of the facts.