Post #2341834

2026-02-22 10:39 UTC

@GigaByte4711@whitespashe.uk @rra@post.lurk.org People often point out, correctly, that the whole monochrome-dithering thing is really just an aesthetic. Using normal JPEG compression or scaleable formats for repeating designs, like SVGs, one can still achieve tiny sites with full colour visuals. Something about the posterised/dithered aesthetic does grab the attention though, so maybe they're doing it for that reason :)

Replies (2)

@GigaByte4711@whitespashe.uk 2026-02-22 11:01

@seachaint@masto.hackers.town @rra@post.lurk.org I'd be interested to see whether there's benefits to dithering on the viewing device side as well. I suppose at this point, they're at the point where they can also provide the option to switch to the full-res images, so maybe the dithering is "good enough" for their use case.

Open ##2341835
@pengfold@social.ty-penguin.org.uk 2026-02-23 18:56

@seachaint@masto.hackers.town @GigaByte4711@whitespashe.uk @rra@post.lurk.org You piqued my curiosity with this comment. First off, I'll say I think that aesthetic looks really nice, irrespective of whether it's doing a good job. Out of interest, I had a look at my blog, where I normalise most images to fit inside 1280x1024, and to have whatever quality is needed for them to be under 300kbytes. I've got 469 images and the effective bits per pixel (i.e. total size in bits / total pixels) is 1.9 after JPEG compression. The magazine says it's using 4 level greyscale images, so that's 2 bits per pixel before PNG compression. They're really not going to need a lot of compression to beat the average across my site. Of course, I could drop the quality further, but I came to the conclusion that 300k was a reasonable compromise between size and visible artifacts.

Open ##2341838