First avatar in Illustrator (also, some questions)

[Maulrus]

I've been using Inkscape for months now. This is my first attempt in Illustrator.

My first question is, which format is best to save as? I saved it as a PNG, because that's what you do in Inkscape, but there are other options now, so I just wanted to know.

[[Insert Neat Username Here]]

Of the formats that work on these boards, I believe PNG is the most size-efficient.

[Maulrus]

How can I set stroke to not scale when I resize?

Figured it out. The Help thing is really helpful.

[Ego Slayer]

.gif is what most stuff is... I thought .gif was smaller than .png, 'cos .gif is more for the web? Size doesn't really mean anything for avatars, anyway. Png supports partial transparency, and .gif fully supports it; older versions of Internet Explorer (or all of them? I haven't used IE in a long time) don't support .png transparency, for example, but FireFox does.

[Trazoi]

.gif is what most stuff is... I thought .gif was smaller than .png, 'cos .gif is more for the web? Size doesn't really mean anything for avatars, anyway. Png supports partial transparency, and .gif fully supports it; older versions of Internet Explorer (or all of them? I haven't used IE in a long time) don't support .png transparency, for example, but FireFox does.

GIFs and PNG avatars are about the same size from my experience. PNG was designed to replace GIFs (and to get around some patent issues in the past). It used to be not as well supported by web browsers, but it's not really an issue now.

For avatars I'd recommend PNG unless you're using a lot of gradient effects. Solid colours compress really well with PNG, but if you put a lot of gradients you might want to switch to JPEG to get a smaller file size at the cost of image quality.