Monday, September 12, 2011

Speed It Up: Optimising Website Graphics and Photographs, Some Tips from Us on Graphic Design



If you've spent any time at all surfing the Internet, then you know how frustrating it can be to wait, seemingly endlessly, for a website's images to load. Though, those flamboyant graphical gadgets will add glitz to your site, they can make it considerably long for your web page to load. Studies show that people generally don't wait more than 8 seconds for a page to load. Therefore, you need to come up with the maximal balancing point between the size and quality of your website's graphics. Usually, web designers incorporate a 3-step method for optimisation of the image of a site.

Graphic Design Tip #1: Resize the Website's Images

The most productive means of dealing with the size of images on a site is to implement image editing software which lets web designers to modify graphics to the most suitable size for your requirements. Always remember that resizing of images should be one prior to putting them on your site. What I am saying is that it would not be a good choice to resize images with the use of web design software; it will still take them a long time to load. Instead, web developers buy specialty software for this. When image sizes are being altered, the designer will reveal the height and width of the images since these tell the visitors' browsers the image proportions. The result? Speedier page loading.

Graphic Design Tip #2: Reduce the Number of Colours Used in Images

The number of colours used in an image determines its size. Since larger-size images take a longer amount of time to load, you need to use as few colours as is feasible. However, the end result could be unnecessary colour banding in the site's imagesthis refers to the places where colours have been taken out and filled in with solid bands of colour This process combines the existing colours in an image to improve the appearance of banded areas. It fools the eye by giving the appearance of more colours than actually exist in an image. A bit of experimentation with professional image editing software helps a web designer define the correct balance between an image's size and its colour.

Graphic Design Tip #3: Saving Your Graphics in a Compressed File Format

The two most widely-used compressed file formats are JPEG and GIF. GIF is short for "graphics interchange format" and does its job by storing data within compressed image files using a loss-less technique. The drawback is that GIF images are bound to 256 individual colours. For this reason, it's best to use GIF files in simple, uncomplicated images, such as small icons or line drawings. JPEG means "joint photographic experts group," and compresses its data in a way that some information is lostknown as a lossy technique. Ideally, this discarded data will shrink the image size without appearing altered to the naked eye. In contrast to GIF files, JPEG files can retain millions of unique colours, so it is very useful for storing detailed photographs and images.

There's plenty to think about when searching for net-based graphic design and spending some time to understand the finer aspects will only serve to help you in the long run.



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