This was a short project in which I attempted more artistic HTML and web design than is seen anywhere else on this site. I was given a 1200 x 768 pixel, 409kb, JPEG file with stylized, inverted images of a company's name and then some very specifically spaced text as part of the image. My client asked me what I would do to make this into a web site home page.
First, we discussed the size of the image and decided to start with a 1024 x 768 rendering; the original was too big for many screens. So, I scaled the image. I think I used GIMP. I also reduced the JPEG quality down to 60; what started as a 409kb image wound up was two images totaling 55kb that didn't noticably lose quality. (This version uses even smaller GIFs.) I can do a smidgen of photo manipulation if pressed. I found that the image needed to be 1020p wide, rather than 1024, to account for browser margins. I overlaid the top of the image upon an HTML background of the same color to account for differences between IE and Firefox. I used various style tags to reproduce the text. The page is XTML 1.0 valid.
I was surprised at how closely I could repoduce the initial image. Perhaps I can learn artistic design!