A built-in Angular feature called BreakPoint Observer gives us a powerful interface for dealing with responsive images. In this article, Tamas Piros will take a closer look at image breakpoints, their use-cases and throughout a hands-on example; you’ll implement them in an Angular application using Angular’s own BreakPoint Observer. Having such compelling tools at our hands helps us create immersive visual web experiences — without losing visitors.
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Moving from one image for all kinds of devices to the common one-size-per-form-factor approach is definitely a step in the right direction. The downside is that, from a performance perspective, the approach is too general. There is more juice to be squeezed. However, from a development and maintenance perspective, it might make sense because three image sizes, or breakpoints, are manageable. In this article, Jon Arne Sæterås will look closely at how well the one-size-per-form-factor approach really works and how you can use smart content delivery networks to improve image performance.
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Four years ago, Jason Grigsby asked a surprisingly difficult question: How do you pick responsive image breakpoints? A year later, he had an answer: Ideally, we’d set responsive image performance budgets to achieve “sensible jumps in file size.”
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Image filters are a fun and effective way to provide visual unity and aesthetic appeal on the web. Keep in mind that they do come with a slight performance hit, but also with the benefits of speedy design in the browser and the opportunity to design interactions with. In this article, Una Kravets will take a look at one of the most popular image effects, grayscale, and assess both the ease of implementation and performance implications of HTML canvas, SVG, CSS filters, and CSS blend modes. Which one will win?
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Ideally, we’d love to have one tool that would either generate “smart enough” crops and plug in the responsive images markup in the build automatically, or provide one interface to visually adjust the focal point of images and output “ready-to-go” markup. We aren’t quite there yet, but we might be soon. In the meantime, the tools listed in this article could be good enough options to consider when tackling a quite daunting task of producing art-directed variants of images — either manually or by building custom CMS plugins.
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In this article, Nadav Soferman introduces a new free open source web tool that will allow you to generate breakpoints for your images interactively: the Responsive Breakpoints Generator. Nadav hopes this tool will help you address some of the challenges related to responsive images. This complexity is the driving force for new solutions that keep arising, such as the HTML5 picture element and srcset image attribute, the Client-Hints specification, and plenty of other client-side and server-side solutions.
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Employing the functionality under the constraints of a large CMS like WordPress, can be very difficult to do, since the growing adoption of responsive images cannot be ignored. Thankfully, with the launch of WordPress 4.4, theme developers and maintainers will find it much easier to introduce responsive image functionality into their themes. In this article, Tim Evko will take a look at how the feature works, and how you can use it to get the best support for your WordPress site.
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Clip paths open up a wide array of exciting possibilities. Understanding the simple mechanics and how everything moves relative to each other can help you create some powerful and captivating interactions for your users. In this article, Dennis Gaebel Jr explains the difference between an SVG clipPath and a CSS clip-path, including examples to guide and inform you through this journey. Finally, he’ll share a few demos both personal and in the wild to help you better understand clipPath animation and inspire your visions.
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HTTP Archive shows that images make up 64% of a web page’s total size on average. Given this, image optimization is key, especially considering that many users will abandon a request if it doesn’t load within a few seconds. The problem with image optimization is that we want to keep file sizes small without sacrificing quality. WebP is an image format that was created in 2010 and is currently being developed by Google. This format delivers lossless and lossy compression for images. Several big names are campaigning for WebP, most notably Google, Facebook and eBay.
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If you’re publishing a lot of content, then high-quality images are vital to keeping readers engaged and coming back for more. But contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to resort to cheesy stock photos (like the one with the matchstick metaphor that jumpstarted my quest for a better process). In this article, Lauren Jung will walk you through how to do just that, as well as provide you with a starter kit of tools to kickstart your foray into the exciting world of quick-and-dirty image creation. Having a streamlined process for creating eye-catching images is imperative and imperative to online publishing because, if done right, it will speed up your efforts by far.
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