As much as we would like it to go away, the sad reality of web design today is that there is still a significant number of people out there who surf the web with Internet Explorer 6. And, in many cases, it’s not their fault – they just can’t help themselves! No, really, they can’t – because they work in corporate environments where their IT department has their machines locked down. For those of us who have had the dubious pleasure of experiencing a large corporate IT department, you know how slow they can be in upgrading anything. I’ve heard anecdotes as recently as a few months ago or departments just now beginning their move from Windows 2000. Sad, but true.

As a web designer, the need to support Internet Explorer also means that you have to make a ton of other trade-offs. One of which, I myself had (un)happily accepted as a fact of life, the inability to leverage PNGs for transparency. Now, before we go any further, I realize that there are several Javascript approaches to achieving transparency, but none of the ones that I have tried have “worked” in every circumstance. That’s why I was so pleasantly surprised that a solution had been under my nose for many, many years and I simply hadn’t known about it. (more…)

I just received the latest issue of Web Designer magazine, which includes a write-up of the many announcements and festivities that went on during the recent Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles. If you were there, or have ever attended MAX, you know that the most anticipated event every year is known as “Sneaks”, in which Adobe engineers, product managers and evangelists get to show off technologies and projects which “may or may not ever make their way into a current or future product”.

This year, I had the pleasure of showing off an experimental project codenamed “Rome”. I’ve received literally hundreds of questions about Rome since that 5 minute demo. And, although I would love to tell you more, unfortunately at this time, my lips must remain sealed. However, for those that missed it, someone took the “liberty” of filming my presentation and posting it to YouTube. So, since it’s on the web, I thought I would help my readers out by linking directly to it. :-)

Now, just don’t ask me if/when/where/how you can get more information about Rome, ‘cuz I can’t tell you. But if you were excited by the demonstration, have thoughts about the “possible” product, feel free to leave a message or send me an email.

The subject of image optimization always crops up during my seminars, and one of the “oh, wow!” moments for almost everyone in the audience is when I compare JPEG optimization from our beloved Photoshop and Fireworks. As everyone who has seen this knows, we get a much smaller JPEG out of Fireworks. But for those of you who have not had the chance to check this out, I wanted to document it here.

To follow along, you should find your favorite uncompressed picture, or if that’s too difficult to find, you can download my RAW image – even if you try this with a compressed JPEG, you’ll still see a dramatic difference. But the optimal workflow is to start with the highest quality possible. I always shoot in the Raw format for many reasons – not the least of which is that I get that completely uncompressed image. If you have a Raw image, you’ll first make any desired adjustments in Camera Raw and then open it in Photoshop CS4.

Save the file as a PSD, since we’ll need it in a few moments. And if you’re working with a RAW image, that means that you’re probably dealing with a rather large image size – my image is a 12 megapixel shot. For this example, I’ve scaled it down to 350 x 233. In order to get the smallest possible JPEG out of Photoshop, it is important that you do NOT try a “Save As” and select JPEG. Instead, we need to go through the “Save for Web and Devices…” process (in the File menu).

(more…)