ok, i wanted a banner with gradient shading, several lines of different title text with drop shadow, plus other background images. it was easy enough to compile a cool looking banner, but one that bloated to 50k! to make it low bandwidth, just do a print-screen, then crop it in a photo program and save with jpg compression. your banner is now around 10k! even when you make all the componets of the image with SS jpg, set to 75, you can still cut the size down to about half by this method.