Category: Tips and Tricks

Never believe your Photoshop for jpegs?

Monday, 02 January, 2012 13:08 Written by Shibz
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I had an interesting encounter with Photoshop this weekend. The details are here:

Image not getting displayed in Android Emulator

The interesting thing is, the Photoshop generated jpegs are always big in size. And it’s been said that they use a lot of meta information that’s why it is. Now I know that while they are putting in a lot of information, they are missing some necessary ones. There used to be a time when we used tools like “JPG cleaner” to bring down the jpegs created by Photoshop. When high bandwidth became cheap and accessible, we kind of stopped using it. Maybe, now it’s time when we have to employ some tools to make sure your images are right before you publish them!

My new wibiya toolbar

Monday, 12 October, 2009 23:18 Written by Shibz
3 Comments

Have you noticed a toolbar at the bottom of this window? That’s my Wibiya toolbar. The team wibiya has sent me their beta invitation yesterday. The toolbar allows you to do quite a lot of stuff. And I think it’s pretty cool. What do you think?

You can see this facebook community link on the toolbar. Click on it and connect with this community using your facebook account. I would like to see who can be a good “conversation starter”.

Testing Zoundry Raven

Tuesday, 28 July, 2009 07:15 Written by Shibz
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This is actually just a test. I wanted to see how the updates go when I do it through the desktop blog client ‘Zoundry Raven’. You can try it yourself at http://www.zoundry.com/

Some thoughts on web typography

Thursday, 23 April, 2009 18:19 Written by Shibz
1 Comment

Web designers are not always well versed in graphic design theory. I know it from my experience. Once I had this interesting conversation with a web design team. Most of them were ‘trained’ in multimedia institutes – 3/6 months course in ‘web designing’! I asked them why they wanted to do ‘web designing’. The answers were funny. One guy joined the course because his cousin has done the same course before and he got a very good job. Another guy actually joined for some Java programming course, later he realized that he is not good for that and found something he can manage.

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If you are writing for the web…

Friday, 01 August, 2008 19:53 Written by Shibz
2 Comments

I think you remember the last article I published on my blog about the good landing pages. This new list of best practices will be helpful if you are writing for the web. Be it websites, landing pages or html newsletters.

  1. Construct paragraphs with two or three sentences. Make the first sentence interesting.
  2. Use simple sentence structures.
  3. Use bullet points and ordered lists.
  4. Try to limit your list items to 7.
  5. Write only one idea per paragraph.
  6. Start with the conclusion, and then elaborate the point. Essays will not work.
  7. Use active voice in the communication.
  8. DO NOT write for the search engine robots. Write for the normal users.
  9. Try not to use self referential phrases like “Click Here”, “Follow this link”, “this website” etc. Rather, use the hyperlinks effectively.
  10. Avoid overuse of all caps and text decoration
  11. Alert users when linking away from the current page
  12. A few links to pages with supporting content will be good. This can establish the credibility
  13. Try not to overuse “clever” or “cute” headlines. Headlines should be the summary of the page content. Unlike print, the web headlines may appear without the content, like search engine results.
  14. Try to give 2-3 word description for all the images used.
  15. Content should always have the most updated information.
  16. Content should be free from typographical and grammatical errors.
  17. Try to take advantage of the semantic web.  Try to provide good tags for the content you write.

I think I have covered almost all the points. Correct me if I am wrong!

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