Image Performance

I’m in serious catch up mode as far as reading, so yesterday I finally made time to sit down and read Mat Marquis’ Image Performance brief from A Book Apart. It’s a quick read that is well worth your time.

Even if you think you know all the ins and outs of how to code images in the new responsive world we develop for now, this is a great refresher on how images work, what you can do, and how you can do it most efficiently and effectively. I know I’ll refer back to this as I work in the future, because the examples were so well done. Bonus: all the photos are of dogs which made the book that much better.

A few highlights below from this short, wonderful book.

Below the surface—that’s where the meaning is. To build a page that can be easily parsed by assistive technologies is to contribute to a more inclusive web; to render a page more performantly is to broaden the web’s reach. To think too shallowly about a project means nudging the larger web in the same direction: toward something meant not for all, but for some; toward something meant only for those who experience it the way we do.

RWD felt—and still feels—like a logical and ongoing extension of the web’s strengths: resilience, flexibility, and unpredictability.

And as these techniques propagate more and more, the web itself will feel faster, with no cost to the people using it—no drawbacks, no compromises, no hacks, and no grainy images.