Sending your Art out onto the Internet:
A Primer on What You Can and Can Not Control

Having an online portfolio is a wonderful thing. It allows your work to be accessed and viewed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by anyone all over the world. As a tool to get your work and your name out there, it can’t be beat, but the internet as it is today, has its limitations and understanding those limitations can make the process of creating an online portfolio much easier.

How big is your pipeline?

If you spend any time on the internet, you are probably aware of the differences between dial-up internet service and broadband. If you’re not, here’s what you need to know in a nutshell:

Think of your connection to the internet as a pipeline between your computer and the world out there. If you have dial-up service through a phone line, the diameter of the pipe is pretty small, so it will take a long time for a lot of information to squeeze through that pipe. If you have broadband, via a cable modem, or DSL, your pipe is bigger and the information can flow faster. Of course, there aren’t any pipes involved; what is really happening is that your computer is downloading information from the web server that houses the particular web site that you have chosen to look at.

So what's a browser?

Just in case you don’t know, a browser is the portal through which you view the internet. Popular browsers are Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Safari (only if you have Macintosh OS X). The newest versions of these browsers work the best with the coding and scripts that current web sites are built with, So if you are using Netscape 4, which came out in 1997, it is really time to move on and upgrade!

The file size thing.

Okay, here it is: Four things to remember:

Pixels-- the computer images of your artwork are made up of little squares called pixels.

Resolution-- the amount of pixels per inch that your image contains. The higher the resolution, the more detail your image has. If you were to have images of your artwork printed, you would want to have the resolution of those images be at least 300 pixels per inch. The more pixels per inch, the finer detail to the image--- something you really want with printed pieces.

Image Size-- the actual height and width of your image.

File Size- is the amount of bytes your image contains. Bytes? A byte is a unit of information, roughly the size of one letter. See this B? You're looking at one byte. A Kilobyte is a thousand bytes. A Megabyte is a million bytes. The abbreviations for kilobyte and megabytes are KB and MB. On the internet, most images are in the kilobyte range.

File size is determined by the resolution (the amount of pixels per inch) and the image size (the height and width). The bigger the file size, the longer the image will take to download from a web site into your computer.

Remember the pipeline? Because of the current limitations of the internet, the resolution of an image for a web site needs to be 72 pixels per inch. I know that sounds just pathetic, but remember that the experience of looking at an image on a computer monitor is profoundly different from looking at your original work, or even looking at a printed version of your work. It isn't as hideous as it seems.

A section of Maryanna's painting showing the pixels it's made of.

Here is a painting by Maryanna Bock. It’s size is 432 pixels wide by 555 pixels high. It's file size is 20KB. That's pretty big and depending on whether you use a dial-up service or broadband, it may take a long time for your computer to download it.
Here's the same painting but smaller. Compare the amount of time it took the two images to download.

Don’t get discouraged quite yet. Here's the painting again in its original large size, but I have gone and sliced it up into pieces. You may notice the pieces as the image downloads. Smaller parts of the whole can download faster and also discourage those who would want to steal your image for their own purposes. Think about it, they would have to go into Photoshop and piece the entire work back together in order to use it. You have the “pain-in-the-neck” factor working in your favor.

Reasons to be cheerful.

File size matters, oh yes it does, but intention also matters too. If you went to a news web site, say CNN.com, you probably would get impatient and annoyed if you had to wait and wait for a page to download because they had big pictures (large file sizes) on the page. Your intention is to read a news story, not to see a huge version of a photo. However, when you choose to visit the online gallery of a artist or photographer, your intention is to look at the pictures, so we can push the envelope a bit.

Something else to think about: With a site such as the wildly popular Ebay, one has to expect that the audience for that site is enormous and that its audience is made up of everyone from the most high-end computer users with huge monitors and the newest computers to folks with ancient (read 10 years old or older) computers running browsers like Netscape 4. The folks at Ebay had to design their site to accommodate everyone if they wanted it to make money.

Is everyone going to look at your site? Or rather, is your audience made up of gallery owners who have their own web sites and/or potential customers who, if they have enough disposable income to buy your work, probably have the latest in hardware, software and browsers. Once again, we can push the envelope a bit.

One way to have a web page with a decent download time, yet allow the world to see your work in all its glory is to have thumbnails, or smaller versions of your work on the web page itself, with instructions for the viewer to click on a thumbnail to make a new browser window open, showing your work in a much larger version.

Color Accuracy, or The Art of Letting Go

This is where the control issues come in, so take deep breath and read on. I am writing this primer on a brand new 20” Cinema Display monitor by Apple. It is set to display millions of colors and is color calibrated. Most people’s monitors may only be set to view thousands of colors (or less) and are not color calibrated. There. I have said it. The one thing that none of us have control over is what the viewers of our web sites have done, or not done to their monitors. This is something that can make a visual artist crazy. I know, having been down this road myself. What you can do is make sure that the original versions of your images are color accurate, especially if you decide to have them printed, but once your work is up on the internet for the world to see, how the world is actually seeing your work is something you have to let go of.

Think of it this way: Say you were a classical composer and you wrote a fabulous piece of music. It would be your intention for that piece of music to be played only by symphony orchestras. Yet, once that piece of music was published and sent out into the world, you truly wouldn't have any control over who played it, whether it was by professional musicians of the members of an elementary school band. What doesn't change is the fact that your creation is out in the world being enjoyed by your fellow human beings. Whether it is played by the New York Philharmonic or a bunch of 4th graders doesn't change the fundamental beauty of your work.

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Thanks to Maryanna Bock for the use of her painting.