We usually export images for the Web from our favorite graphics software. Our eyes fixate on an image’s preview, adjusting the quality settings until we’ve found that sweet spot, where the file size and quality are both the best they can be. After having gone to all that care and effort, we would be forgiven for thinking that our image is in the best shape possible, but that’s not always the case. In fact, much more data is usually left in such files, data that keeps our users waiting just a bit longer than necessary. Thankfully, a number of popular tools can help us optimize images even further!
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Many large businesses had a chief electricity officer when electricity first started to power the industrial economy. Companies just couldn’t operate without power, but it wasn’t always that way. Over a decade after introducing electricity, many business leaders were still building factories by water, despite no longer needing it to power their machinery. They needed help integrating the new technology into their thinking and that is where the chief electricity officer came in.
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Veterans in this industry should mentor new team members and share with them the knowledge that they know they will need to succeed. This article is a follow-up “Lessons Learned in Leading New Web Professionals.” This one looks at the other side of the team leader-new employee dynamic. We’ll cover the practices that Jeremy Girard has found are consistently followed by employees who excel in their new role and grow in this industry.
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This article is the third part of an article series about improving your design workflow in Adobe Fireworks with some of the best extensions currently available. You may want to check out the first and second parts if you’re not already familiar with them.
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As Web designers, developing websites that work well on mobile devices is an important aspect of the work we do. And selling a responsive design is no different than selling anything else. It all starts with solving problems. For this project, we highlighted the benefits of a responsive approach beyond the familiar benefit of support for mobile devices that we normally mention to prospective clients. Here are some of the key points we made in discussing the value of a responsive approach for a website without an obvious need for mobile support.
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Today, Mike Cunsolo will show us how to use Grunt in a project to speed up and change the way you develop websites, looking briefly at what Grunt can do, before jumping into how to set up and use its various plugins. Then he will explain how to build a simple input validator, using Sass as a preprocessor, how to use grunt-cssc and CssMin to combine and minify our CSS, how to build our compressed assets on the fly, and much more!
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In this article, Zeno Rocha presents a series of workflows in Alfred that will boost your productivity! A collection of great tricks to automate your work. Hopefully, some will speed up your workflow. Maybe they will even inspire you to share some of your hidden secrets of productivity.
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Much of that page weight could be reduced if images were conditionally optimized based on device width, pixel density and modern image formats. These reductions would result in faster loading times, but the debate isn’t about whether to optimize images for different devices, but about how to go about doing so. In this article, Shawn Jansepar will take a look at Mobify.js, which lets us generate small images for small devices from a single high-resolution image.
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I don’t know about you, but I wake up every morning with at least 10 emails that I didn’t have when I went to sleep. While most people probably know that these emails aren’t being sent manually by some sleep-deprived, coffee-fuelled intern, many people don’t understand the ins and outs of the systems that automate tasks such as sending email.
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Is sketching by hand more than a nostalgic activity? How is paper any different from a screen, especially when hardware is becoming more and more sophisticated? Is improving your hand-sketching skills really worthwhile when high-tech software is advancing every day?
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