Web/graphic design: How to get sharpest, text-based image when resized?

[Mangetout]

@Chronos

But the company can do that with just the product, too. In fact, they’re more likely to do it with just the product, since not having the source prevents them from being able to do the modifications properly.

True, and I’ve seen that happen too (and the outcome can often be even worse because opening a jpeg in an image editor, adding or changing bits, then recompressing can result in some horrible looking artifacts)

I don’t have any entrenched view on whether it’s good/bad/right/wrong to have to hand over the design source for imagery along with the product - just really wanted to point out that the change of format does possibly introduce a change in the supplier/consumer relationship, that may need to be considered.

[Mangetout]

@choie

Although… waitasec: would calling a second image work when someone is just zooming in on their phone or mobile device? I don’t think that’s how responsive sites work; they don’t adjust on my tablet or phone when I use my fingers to zoom in our out. They do if I go from horizontal to vertical, but zooming does nothing except make the existing layout look bigger. If there’s a way to do that, it’s beyond my technical knowledge.

Yeah, responsive sites normally only react to changes in window size or browser type - the ‘zoom’ function on most modern browsers now works in the same sense as a camera zoom - no reflowing of anything, no substitution of anything - it just gets rendered larger or smaller.

Which brings me back to the original problem - the customer is always right, of course, but is the customer doing something that no reasonable human would ever do? If you zoom in so far that the logo fills the screen, and nothing else is visible, then you’re not actually using the product in a way that any sane consumer will try to do.

It would be like complaining that when you zoom in, you can’s see the whole page. Duh.

I just tried extreme zoom on the logos for Amazon, eBay and Google - they all go a bit blurry.

[Reply]

@choie

Although… waitasec: would calling a second image work when someone is just zooming in on their phone or mobile device? I don’t think that’s how responsive sites work; they don’t adjust on my tablet or phone when I use my fingers to zoom in our out. They do if I go from horizontal to vertical, but zooming does nothing except make the existing layout look bigger. If there’s a way to do that, it’s beyond my technical knowledge.

I’ve never seen a website behave this way, and I’m not sure if it’s possible. I would instead suggest following industry standard UI practices: If you want an image to be zoomable, have it be clickable first and then the clicked version can be zoomed and dragged at will, either because it’s loaded as a raw image in the user’s browser or because it’s lightboxed.

PS if you’re interested in the performance benefits, definitely check out Cloudflare’s caching system too. In one (extreme) case, it brought one of our page load times from about 30 seconds to < 3 seconds. (It was really a poorly written PHP product catalog that did some 10,000 separate database calls… we didn’t have the ability to rewrite the backend code at the time, only speed up the user-facing side of things.) There are Wordpress plugins that make integration simple, too. CloudFlare totally puts most CDNs to shame with its combination of Mirage, caching, global edge node availability at no extra charge, and a whole bunch of other features… all for either free or $18/mo. It’s crazy-sauce. I know I sound like an ad for them; I’ve just been super blown away by what they offer. In 20+ years of web development, they are one of the very few services that thoroughly and completely floored me.

[Anthony_Reed]

I’ve never faced such a problem as I’ve been learning web design for only two years. I don’t have much experience and, unfortunatelly, can’t give you a good piece of advice. But I know how hard it is to work with peope who don’t understand a thing and insist on doing something that is unnecessary (sometimes even stupid). You have much patience and good skills, that’s why you can work with your clients. As for me, I reject a job in such situations or try to persuade my clients to build a new website for them using one of the best wordpress themes. But I hope I will improve my skills and will be ready to any kind of work in future.