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I've been an IT pro for awhile and I am recently getting more and more into web development. I'm especially interested in HTML 5, CSS 3, JavaScript, jQuery, and responsive design concepts. One thing I always seem to have problems with is images. I'm hoping some pros here can help out someone just starting.
Where do you find images to use for your client's sites / or your own sites?
Besides taking your own pictures, is there a "go to" site that devs use that has good variety, high quality, and is preferably free?
Once you acquire some images, do you go through a routine of re-sizing them or otherwise fixing them up for use on your site? Gimp is pretty good for re-scaling, but sometimes the image quality degrades. It's probably best to get good images with the right size to begin with. Is there some CSS magic that devs typical use to get their images the size they want?
Like I said, I've been using Gimp to do simple things like create cool text, re-size images, and create basic banners. Is this a pretty good tool to use for this, or am I missing out on something better (and easier to use).
I've read a lot of articles online, but I trust people's input on this site.
If you need images for production, that you yourself can't make, you can check out shutterstock, for example. If your clients need photos or graphics, they will have to pay for them, one way or the other ;)
Here are some good primers for dealing with images on the web:
Adaptive images - http://adaptive-images.com
or
Responsive Images - http://scottjehl.github.io/picturefill/
Retina Quality Images on the Web – http://imulus.github.io/retinajs/
With Bitmap images (Photos for example) always get the largest you can get and scale down to the sizes you need. With Vector - SVG for example - you can scale without losing quality, but when you scale vectors you will likely have to rework the drawing, because the proportions will not fit.
GIMP is open source and if you can not spend any money it will do the job. Like is said: scale down from large photos. No the other way around. You will lose Sharpness and Quality fast when enlarging images.
I don't know of good Photoshop alternatives on Windows. But I could give many great and cheap alternative for Photoshop, should you be using a Mac.
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I'm building a photography portfolio website, which will have a fluid, responsive design. To have the images look good at all sizes, and to not have to deal with retina resolution issues, I'm thinking of just using SVG files for all images.
Using SVGs sounds like a perfect solution to these issues, but for some reason I haven't seen any websites exclusively use them, which makes me wonder if there are any downsides to them (aside from lack of support in IE8, which I don't care about).
If you use them too much, or in animated form the end user might have some performance issues, especially on smart phones. Icon fonts are much CPU-friendly, but they are much simple and monochromatic.
Other than the lack of support for older-browsers, there's no downside to them. We love SVGs.
As mentioned in the comments, I would go with SVG icons/sprites/cartoons, and stick to bitmap/raster formats for photos. Photographs are bitmaps by nature, and when trying to convert them to vectors you may find some issues:
Not everything can be converted into a vector... or it could, but at a high price (bigger file size, complex files that require more processing). Then we could start a whole debate about file size vs image quality.
You are limited by the camera/lens technology: using photos in SVG may give crispier/sharper edges on scale, but the details inside won't appear because they are not there (e.g.: you may have a picture of a hand in SVG, but it doesn't matter how much you zoom in, you may prevent pixelation but you won't see the cells either).
Older browsers will not support the format (although you already mentioned that this is not a problem in your case).
Then there are other issues specific to a photography portfolio/store website:
If you are planning on selling the pictures, by using SVG you'd be giving the product away for free: right-click, "Save image as..." and the user will have the full size image without paying.
You could add a message/watermark to prevent that (or to sign/give credit to yourself), but watermarks would be "easy" to remove. And sadly we all know how the Internet works.
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I just learned about responsive design. My question is what steps does a HTML designer has to do to make a design responsive?
It appears that a responsive design is all about using #media queries and controlling the flow of elements on the page if it gets resized by setting max-width, min-width and manipulating floating, margins and padding depending on browser window's size.
Is there anything else besides #media query that needs to be done for responsive design?
Responsive Images (different images in HTML for different situations) is an important one.
Few important bits :
Use of srcset attribute for switching between different versions of the same image.
http://responsiveimages.org is a well of resources on this subject.
Use of automation tools for imaging - One of my favorites is Grunt and here is a nice read about it: http://addyosmani.com/blog/generate-multi-resolution-images-for-srcset-with-grunt/
It really makes a lot of difference when user on mobile opens a page with images that are sized for it, less data and well faster loads :)
Tools like Grunt may seem like they take some work to setup but once you start working with it its so easy and fast.
More reading material:
https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/image-optimization
http://blog.cloudfour.com/responsive-hero-images/
Absolutely. There are three main tenants of responsive web design from Ethan Marcotte's original book, Responsive Web Design (abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design). They are:
1 - Fluid Grids - percentage based widths instead of pixels for your layout/grid. This is arguably even more important than the media query as it allows websites to be fluid and not fixed. So smart phones and tablets come in too many sizes to count, so having a fluid layout makes sure your design can fit nicely at different device widths.
2 - Flexible images - which are basically images that shrink when the browser get smaller. There are plenty of challenges around images in the context of responsive, which is why #Ivan86 smartly recommended using the srcset attribute on the image tag, which I also highly recommend but also maybe wait on that until you're comfortable with the basics. Since you're just starting out, let's keep it simple with 'flexible images' which are images that are set to max-width: 100% with a parent container around them that is % based. This allows the image to shrink as the parent container (div, figure, etc) gets smaller. However, if you do happen to be interested in srcset I posted two articles on this recently: www.richfinelli.com/srcset-part-1, http://www.richfinelli.com/srcset-part-2/ which explain how to use this new attribute.
3 - Media queries - as you said, are used in your css to change the layout based on available browser width.
As I think you're finding out, once you get in to responsive web design you realize there's multiple layers of challenges you can find yourself in. But I recommend buying Ethan Marcotte's book from abookapart.com to get a good jump on it. Very short and actually funny.
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my new website is now finally finished and it runs pretty smooth, on most devices i tested. the only thing I optimized was the code, so i deleted all comments and other unnessescary lines in all .css and .html files. but beyond that, what else can i do to optimise a website specific for mobile contextes?
you can see here here (all images are only used for demonstration): http://mbaljan.de/weblab/sites/designtisch/
Firebug "page speed" provides lot of optimization options . You can try them .
You consider changing what is being served to the browser based on either internet connection speed or device or both. For example, serve smaller images when the website is being viewed on a mobile device. That would speed up the load time. Check out Adaptive Images to do that: http://adaptive-images.com/
Apart from that, trying to reduce the number of files being loaded is a good idea. E.g. 1 jQuery/javascript file. You can also try to minify all your javascript files (and CSS if you really want to) to reduce their files sizes and decrease load time. If you intend to modify those files again in future you'd have to keep an uncompressed backup though.
Check out: http://javascriptcompressor.com/
Another thing you could make sure you're doing is using image sprites. That way you reduce the number of image files being loaded. This won't work with Adaptive Images, so I find it best to use sprites just for things like logos and icons.
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Can anyone give me any advice or direct me to a good tutorial on converting an Adobe Illustrator template to a WordPress template?
I've read a lot about doing this by using slices, but I've also heard sites built with slices are a nightmare to maintain. This site will be updated frequently so I can't have that problem. Also, the site's background has a gradient, so I'm not sure how slices would work with that.
If I have to use slices to make this template though I could go with a solid color, but the gradient is preferred.
Thanks
Use slices just to cut up your site in a way that allows you to use current CSS techniques. For example, a small slice for a background image that's a seamless pattern, or a thin, tall slice for a vertical gradient (you'd use CSS to repeat-x it across). You'll probably need to hide various layers as you slice to get the right bits and pieces. You've probably read folks who have had issues with the old concept of slicing a design - where the whole site was built on pieced together images, and making edits was a pain as a result.
If you just use slicing to basically grab the individual elements you need (read up on image spites as well for efficiency!) and background images - just the parts you need whereever you can, because you can repeat vertically and horizontally - you'll be just fine.
You are going to want to break down all of the elements of your illustrator template. And then build that from the ground up on creating your Wordpress theme. Since you have a gradient background, slicing it all up would not be the best option. Take all of the elements of this Illustrator template and save them separately.
Then I would familiarize with the steps on turning these elements into a fully function Wordpress theme
http://wp.tutsplus.com/articles/news/building-wordpress-themes-from-scratch-a-new-book-from-one-of-our-wptuts-authors/
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I'm developing a photography portfolio website. I want to know what would the best practice be for downloading images from a database. As of right now the entire gallery is roughly 20MB. The gallery is still in development, I intended on just having an "loading" graphic run between photos. But the client seems to prefer image preloading. Is it practical to have the page preload 20MB+ of photos, and if so, what is the best way to do so? Or would it be best to go with the loading screen?
20MB to fetch in one go is too much, it will result in a slow and annoying user experience. You should probably ajax-load each image in turn.
Incidently, how big are your images? An 800 x 600 jpeg should be around 50k at 90 - 95% quality. So 20 MB would be 400 images. This seems like a lot for one page. I'm guessing your image sizes are large - consider reducing them. If you want to have hi-res, non-compressed versions available, have these individually linked.
Edit: Just for reference, what I would consider a very large page (the html doc + all css, js and image assets) would be ~ 1MB. An "average" sized page is probably ~ 100k.
Why not "thumbnailing" images via some server side script, preload thumbnails & display full image on thumbnail click (using some kind of lightbox js)
This would reduce a lot preloading time while keeping full porfolio preview.
I think the better way is to preload the next couple of photos while you are viewing the current one
Yeah, definitely don't do this. Rememebr that some users will be connecting with mobile connections and some of them paying by the megabyte - if you do this then you've just used up 20 MB of their allowance with images that they may never see.
I don't think either solution is practical - I would suggest you scale down your images.
20MB is probably too much unless it is a specialized application where you are confident that 1) users will wait and 2) that they will view the majority of those images. Otherwise, you are wasting bandwidth.
I would look at a strategy where your images are cached in server memory to avoid database traffic combined with client-side pre-caching of a few images where you can add it. For example, if the user is on image "A", load "B" and "C" as well.