Tag: Web Design

Don’t use JPEG for logos… and don’t think you can solve the problem by re-saving the JPEG as a PNG

Once you go JPEG, you can’t go back.

You may recall having seen this previously on my blog:

I’ve been singing the “Don’t use JPEG for logos!” refrain for so long that most of my clients (and whoever they’re dealing with to deliver logo image files to them) know logos on the web should be in PNG format (or even better, SVG), not JPEG.

But a lot of people don’t seem to understand that you can’t turn a JPEG into a PNG.

Oh, sure, you can technically do that. By which I mean, you can open a JPEG in Photoshop or a similar image editing program, and save it as a PNG. But doing that won’t fix anything.

JPEG is a “lossy” format. That means that its compression algorithm permanently loses data about the image for the sake of a smaller file size. There’s no way to get that data back. PNG is not a lossy format, which means that it compresses the image data in a way that it can faithfully recreate the original input image.

So, what do you think happens when you open a JPEG and re-save it as a PNG? That’s right… it looks exactly like the JPEG did.

Like I said at the beginning, once you go JPEG, you can’t go back. The only option is to track down the original source image in a lossless format, or to manually clean up the results as best as you can.

I wish I could say I’ve never done this, but I’m a pragmatic individual, and I also like to try to solve problems myself… it’s often faster and easier than tracking down the original source. More times than I can remember, I have used the flood tool to turn splotchy logos back into blocks of solid color — doing my best to clean up the anti-aliased edges. And when the characteristics of the logo are right, I’ll often re-set the text in the original fonts (recognizing fonts by sight is a valuable skill), tweaking Bezier curves if the logo has any customizations, and then try my best to faithfully recreate object shapes by tracing them with the pen tool.

It’s perversely kind of fun, and I especially like when I can do it without even bothering to tell the client. They usually just care about the results, not about how the sausage gets made. Except when the client is an Italian restaurant. Then I let them worry about the sausage.

My hot take on 303 Creative v. Elenis

This morning I’ve been preoccupied with 303 Creative v. Elenis, a case presently being heard by the Supreme Court. I have a lot of complicated thoughts on this case. Too many to sit comfortably with long enough to craft a well-structured blog post about, when I have actual work I need to be doing.

But since this case has potential implications for my “actual work,” it matters. I’ve been exploring the idea with some friends on Facebook, so for now I am going to just encapsulate my thoughts with a few lightly-edited excerpts of what I posted there.

First off, let me be clear that I’m on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Lorie Smith, the plaintiff in this case. But we do similar work, and I absolutely feel that as a freelance consultant, I should have a right to choose which projects I take on. I would have no problem building a website that was pro-same-sex-marriage. But I would absolutely choose not to work on a website that was anti-same-sex-marriage.

In broader terms, I would eagerly accept work that fights discrimination, while I would actively refuse to accept a project that promotes discrimination. But it’s impossible to just invert my political beliefs and say that’s where Ms. Smith stands. Because the work itself isn’t for or against discrimination. It’s the refusal to do the work that constitutes the discrimination. Still, should she be legally compelled to do work she personally disagrees with?

That case with the bakery a few years ago always made me feel uncomfortable, even though ultimately I sided with the gay couple who wanted the cake. I think I’ve hit on the key point: there is a significant difference between selling an off-the-shelf product in a public space, vs. accepting a job to produce new custom work to client specifications, or to do future work-for-hire off-site.

In baking there’s a “gray area” in work-for-hire, unlike web design, and it comes back to the generic sheet cake example. (The baker was willing to produce a generic cake for the couple.) There’s no equivalent to a “generic sheet cake” in web design, other than a service like Squarespace. I don’t think a service provider (e.g. Squarespace) that commodifies a website as a prebuilt, “off-the-shelf” product should be allowed to discriminate in who uses its service, as long as their activities are legal. That’s radically different from compelling a “creative” to produce new, custom work promoting ideas they don’t agree with.

But ultimately this whole case just reeks of ulterior motive by the political right wing. Any reasonable person in my position, when asked to take on a project they disagree with (or just don’t care to do, or are too booked up to take on) should just offer to refer the potential client to someone else and leave it at that. This lawsuit is not about individual freedom of speech… it’s a salvo in a culture war. I suspect it could even play a role in future cases concerning content moderation on social media sites.

Please, web font vendors, learn how to use CSS @font-face properly!

This has been bugging me for years and I can’t believe it’s still happening.

Being able to use custom fonts has been a huge boon to web design. And font hosting services like Typekit (sorry, I will never call it Adobe Fonts) and Google Fonts make using custom fonts easy.

But sometimes you still buy a font license that involves hosting the font files directly on your own server, and that’s where things get absolutely maddening because, for some reason, someone early on grossly misinterpreted how to use @font-face and that error has been perpetuated by countless unthinking others.

(Yes, I’m being harsh. But this is really not that complicated. And getting it right makes writing your CSS and HTML so much easier.)

Here’s an example of some font-specifying CSS you might receive from a font vendor:

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Font-Name-Regular';
    src: url('Font-Name/Font-Name-Regular.woff2') format('woff2'),
         url('Font-Name/Font-Name-Regular.woff') format('woff');
    font-weight: normal;
    }
.Font-Name-Regular {
    font-family: 'Font-Name-Regular';
    }

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Font-Name-Regular';
    src: url('Font-Name/Font-Name-Regular-Italic.woff2') format('woff2'),
         url('Font-Name/Font-Name-Regular-Italic.woff') format('woff');
    font-weight: normal;
    font-style: italic;
    }
.Font-Name-Regular-Italic {
    font-family: 'Font-Name-Regular';
    font-style: italic;
    }

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Font-Name-Bold';
    src: url('Font-Name/Font-Name-Bold.woff2') format('woff2'),
         url('Font-Name/Font-Name-Bold.woff') format('woff');
    font-weight: normal;
    }
.Font-Name-Bold {
    font-family: 'Font-Name-Bold';
    }

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Font-Name-Bold';
    src: url('Font-Name/Font-Name-Bold-Italic.woff2') format('woff2'),
         url('Font-Name/Font-Name-Bold-Italic.woff') format('woff');
    font-weight: normal;
    font-style: italic;
    }
.Font-Name-Bold-Italic {
    font-family: 'Font-Name-Bold';
    font-style: italic;
    }

This is, in fact, the exact code I just received yesterday from a font vendor when I purchased a license, with the actual font name removed to protect the guilty innocent.

What’s so bad about this, you might ask? Aside from the conventions I dislike of indenting the closing } and using 4 spaces instead of tabs, there are two glaring problems with this:

Because the font-family name defined for each weight and style is different, when you go to use this font, you need to specify the font-family every time you want to use bold or italics in your HTML, or at least use the custom CSS classes defined here. No! No no no! You should not have to apply a class to get bold or italics to render properly. The  and  tags should do that on their own!
Don’t f***ing define a bold font with font-weight: normal;! If you don’t realize from this, alone, that something is wrong with your approach, stop coding right now.

So, how should this be done, you ask?

Well, it’s simple. Each @font-face declaration has four properties. One is src: which tells the browser where to find the correct font file(s) for this face. The other three properties work together to define the context in which this particular src should be used: any time this combination of font-family, font-weight and font-style come together.

You can use the same font-family in different @font-face declarations as long as font-weight and font-style are different. In fact, you’re supposed to! That’s the way it’s designed to work!!!

When you do this properly, you don’t need any custom CSS classes. Try this on for size:

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Font-Name';
    src: url('Font-Name/Font-Name-Regular.woff2') format('woff2'),
         url('Font-Name/Font-Name-Regular.woff') format('woff');
    font-weight: normal;
}

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Font-Name';
    src: url('Font-Name/Font-Name-Regular-Italic.woff2') format('woff2'),
         url('Font-Name/Font-Name-Regular-Italic.woff') format('woff');
    font-weight: normal;
    font-style: italic;
}

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Font-Name';
    src: url('Font-Name/Font-Name-Bold.woff2') format('woff2'),
         url('Font-Name/Font-Name-Bold.woff') format('woff');
    font-weight: bold;
}

@font-face {
    font-family: 'Font-Name';
    src: url('Font-Name/Font-Name-Bold-Italic.woff2') format('woff2'),
         url('Font-Name/Font-Name-Bold-Italic.woff') format('woff');
    font-weight: bold;
    font-style: italic;
}

Aside from the fact that this eliminates 1/3 of the lines of code, it also will make your HTML much cleaner and more properly separates content from styling.

Here’s an example of some HTML you might have to write using the first approach:

This is some regular text, which also
includes a bit of italics
and even a dash of bold.

Now, granted, my version does require you to define the font-family for your  tags in your CSS file. But guess what… you’re supposed to do that! Put this in your CSS:

p { font-family: 'Font-Name'; }

With that in place, the proper HTML for the same appearance becomes this:

This is some regular text, which also
includes a bit of italics
and even a dash of bold.

So, again… when thinking about @font-face, just remember these two simple things:

All @font-face declarations for the same font family should have the same font-family. (Seems kind of obvious when I put it that way, doesn’t it?)
The value for font-weight should be the actual weight of the font. Only the “regular” weight should have font-weight: normal; or font-weight: 400;. If you’re using font-weight: normal; on a bold font, you’ve done something wrong.

This change makes for cleaner code, easier maintenance, and proper separation of content from design.

Addendum

Shortly after I posted this, I went back and looked at the unnamed font vendor’s sample page, because I knew it referenced “the @font-face standard since 2017”. I could not believe that this approach was actually a “standard,” so I tracked down the source, an article Bram Stein published on A List Apart in 2017 called Using Webfonts.

Guess what… Bram Stein’s examples do it the right way!

I do know one place where I’ve consistently seen this wrong way I’m railing against… it’s the code generated on FontSquirrel (no link, on principle) whenever you download a font. Other “web font generator” sites like FontSquirrel probably do it to. They’re all wrong… but Bram Stein isn’t. Don’t drag him down with this bad code!

Bane of the web designer

DON'T USE JPEG FOR LOGOS...
...USE PNG INSTEAD

Actually, the real bane of the web designer is that I can’t even post this directly on social media like Facebook or Twitter because they automatically convert images to JPEG and compress the hell out of them!

Tips on saving vector images from Adobe Illustrator for SVG web use

With Internet Explorer 8 end of life coming on January 12, all kinds of new possibilities are opening up to us web developers who can finally start making use of technologies that have had wide support in modern browsers for years, but that we were reluctant to embrace because of the need for IE8-friendly workarounds.

For me, one of those things is SVG images. In recent years, especially since Responsive Web Design (and high-resolution displays) took off, I’ve been receiving web designs more and more in Illustrator format, rather than Photoshop. It’s great to get these assets as vectors that I can scale and size as I need in my build-out of high-res, responsive websites. But until now I had still been pulling vector assets over into Photoshop and producing multiple carefully-sized versions of things like logos and custom icons.

Now, however, SVG is a viable — in fact, preferable, given its flexibility and smaller file size (plus the ability to hack the XML code right in the image files themselves) — alternative to multiple PNGs of every image.

The thing is, while I have been using Photoshop extensively for over 20 years, I’ve never really gotten the hang of Illustrator. I know just enough to go into an Illustrator file, pull out the assets I need, and try not to screw anything else up in the process. That’s what this article is for.

Over the past week I have pulled a number of vector assets out of Illustrator designs as SVGs for a couple of projects, and I’m starting to get the process down. Here’s what you need to know.

The Steps

1. Select the object you want to make into an SVG. Most of the time designers will have grouped the pieces of the object together, so just a single click on the object will select it. Make careful note of the blue outlines to be sure everything you want is selected (and maybe even more importantly, that nothing else you don’t want is). You can also click and drag to select all objects within an area, or use the Layers palette to select the elements. This can be tedious, but be sure you’ve got what you need — and only what you need — highlighted. Once it’s selected, copy it to your clipboard.

2. Create a new document in Illustrator. Default settings are fine. Once the blank document appears, paste in the copied object. It should appear centered in the document. There should be a ton of space around it. That’s good. Since we’re dealing with vector art, scale is irrelevant. You just want to make sure everything fits within the boundaries of the document. (The “artboard” if you’re familiar with Illustrator speak.) Keep the object selected (blue outline). If you deselected it, just Select All.

3. Shrink the artboard to fit the object. If you don’t do this, you’ll end up with a bunch of blank space within the defined dimensions of the image and it will be impossible to work with. Good thing it’s super easy. With the entire object selected, go to Object > Artboards > Fit to Selected Art and you’ll get a perfect container.

4. IMPORTANT! If there are transparency effects within the object, you need to flatten it now. A lot of the time you can skip this step. But if you do, you may find that parts of the design are missing in the resulting SVG. I found it’s easy to forget this; I don’t find it intuitive that this would get lost in the SVG conversion. So go to Object > Flatten Transparency… Review the settings here to ensure you’re happy with them (sorry, I don’t have a lot of guidance here), and click OK Your image should not look different. If it does, undo, and repeat with different settings in the Flatten Transparency dialog.

5. Save. There’s no “Save for Web” option for SVG. Just regular ol’ “Save As”. Be sure to set the Format menu to SVG (svg). You could try compressed, but really SVGs are pretty small anyway, and I like to keep the code editable so I can tinker with it if needed. (Changing the color fill, for instance.) Once again there are a ton of settings presented in the SVG Options dialog, but I’ve found the default settings seem to work fine. (One change I have made is to set CSS Properties to Presentation Attributes but I’m not entirely sure yet what difference it makes.)

That’s it! You should now have an SVG ready for placement using an <img> tag, or as background-image in CSS. Just note that CSS treats SVG images a bit differently than regular JPEGs and PNGs, so you may need to add a few extra properties to keep the SVGs within their container elements in your page.