Not well known until recent years, the PNG file format ("Portable Network Graphics") was originally a replacement for the GIF in 1995 due to copyright law conflicts on the latter’s compression algorithm.

Despite no support for animation and lacking widespread browser compatibility, PNGs today are well known for possessing lossless compression while creating reasonably small file sizes often competitive with high-quality JPEGs. This especially holds true when the image contains areas of high contrast, like sharp text and borders. While JPEGs would often create compression artifacts near such locations, PNGs do not. In addition, PNGs can handle an alpha (transparency) layer, extremely useful when stacking multiple images in a browser or importing into a graphics editor such as Adobe Photoshop or The Gimp.

About this file: this logo was originally created for my personal website, PlasmaFire.org, using The Gimp. Multiple transform and blur routines were used to generate the 3D smoke effects around the typeface.