WTF: What the file?
No idea what different file types are for?
Get acquainted with the most common file types in the design world.
AKA Joint Photographic Experts Group
Jpegs are great to use on graphics that are image heavy, like photographs or anything with complex shapes. Jpeg's do not support transparent backgrounds.
Most commonly used on the web and print projects. As you can easily change the resolution to suit your project requirements.
AKA Portable Network Graphics
PNG’s are mainly found in the online world and work best on images that have big areas of plain colour or simple shapes. PNG’s support transparent backgrounds, which look great online.
Example: Social media icons
AKA Graphics Interchange Format
A range of combined static moving images, used and shared digitally. These file types can be made quite small, which aids quick loading on the web.
AKA Portable Document Format
This file type was created by Adobe, used mostly to cement word documents,share complex designs and package proposals etc.
Logos and large graphics can also be saved in this format, which enables you to view them without any fancy editing software. PDF’s are widely accepted for most documents.
Example - Restaurant menu
AKA Encapsulated Postscript
File type mainly used when large graphics files are shared. Files are mainly made of of shapes in a vector form (meaning they can be made bigger or smaller with ease and won’t lose resolution).
Example - Logos
There are heaps of different file types! If you want to know about any not mentioned above, just ask :)
I hope this helped with understanding what different files types are used for and why.