In reply to Artifacts:
hrant, thanks, will do, as soon as possible!
Old Nick, I hear ya, lol. But, I think all ideas are awesome. And then doubly awesome is having the ability, the time, and the means to express them. The content of the Idea is (imho) irrelevant. We would all be just a little bit poorer without even just one.
Didn't Ayn Rand write about that kind of stuff?
JamesM, sorry about that. I roll with Photoshop for my bitmap / raster goodness. Open up a new doc, let's say something standard from the Preset drop down menu such as the 800px x 600px with a white background. Use whatever you tool you fancy to create a 250px wide x 350px rectangle and fill it with 255-0-0 red, and then Save-for-Web .jpg file with Quality of 100% name it Red.
Close out the 'live' doc, and open up Red.jpg. Re-save the Red doc as a .jpg with a Quality of 50% , name it Red_Artifacts.
Close out the 'live' doc, and open Red_Artifacts. jpg. Grab your zoom tool, and zoom in 400% or so on one of the corners ... and there they are :) The more the process is repeated (especially with lower and lower Quality % settings), the more prevalent the Artifacts. I think it has something to do with a combo of factors including the color frequency of 255-0-0 red in the rgb gamut.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut
Hope those instructions will yield the similar results. Of course there are several methods in which Artifacts will appear, (simply scaling down a 255-0-0 red .jpg file is another simple method), but I don't see Artifacts as something unwanted ... they come with the territory :). If you prefer not to have any Artifacts present it is best to save pure red (and simple raster images in general) as gif files.
And speaking of which that gif color table is f'n amazing. Someone should create tile patterns for the kitchen (or whatever) with 'em :) Simply load some image - or even better create one of your own - no matter how complex, and then view it's contents via the gif color table, take a screen shot of it, open the screeny and use the Eyedropper tool to identify the tile colours need to re-create the gif color panel - :)!!
Nerdy wall patterns! Use the free prog rasterbator to create it XXL...
n.