I’ve been on a mission to improve performance since I migrated this site to Eleventy, especially after I realised I was burning through bandwidth once I moved to Netlify. Some of the biggest offenders were the animated illustrations I use across the site. They look great, but they ain’t cheap.
I mentioned earlier that I’ve been replacing the WebP images on my website with AVIF to reduce file sizes and decrease bandwidth usage. But when I started converting my portfolio images, I noticed something odd. Some weren’t smaller—they were bigger. Sometimes much bigger.
The images on my website have changed formats several times over the decades. JPEG, PNG, and GIF were designed in a very different era of computing, and their compression methods reflect the technology available at the time. Formats such as AVIF, HEIC, and WebP use newer techniques which can preserve more apparent detail while storing less information.
Most days, my website sits there quietly, publishing writing, showing off my work, selling a few products, and generally behaving itself. But today, I got an email from Netlify telling me that, although my migrated website was only days old, I had already burned through 50% of my allocated monthly bandwidth.
I’ve been quietly working on a side project called sho!io, and I’m opening it up to a few people. It’s meant to be a quiet place where you can share one thing you’re making each day, without the usual social noise. It’s early and very much still in progress, but I’d really value your honest feedback if you’re up for trying it.
Sometimes I don’t want to style a whole word or heading. I want to style individual letters—to nudge a character into place, give one glyph extra weight, or animate a few letters independently. Sadly, some splitting solutions don’t deliver an always accessible result. With the help of a developer pal, I've written my own text splitter, Splinter.js.
Yours truly over at the SQSP Themes blog. “Squarespace is (obviously) the platform of choice for intergalactic space warriors. So, less than a week before Count Binface was due to announce his manifesto, the challenge was to develop my designs into a new website using Squarespace.”
While more established artists, bands, composers, sound designers, and other music professionals often have a bigger budget to spend on their websites, plenty more choose the DIY route with Squarespace or Wix. To help those people stand out, I added three new designs to my Squarespace templates store.
For most of my career, I’ve encouraged designers and developers to learn from past masters of design and make inspiring web work. Now, I’m launching Stuff & Nonsense Premium Squarespace templates that help them do just that.
My earliest blog posts date back to 2004. There’s very little in them which is relevant today, and they’re full of dead links, which, I’m told, is bad for my site’s SEO. So recently, I’ve done two things to hide these posts from search engines.
Jon posted about his icon design for ShareOpenly, so I decided to add it to my blog too.
Dan Cederholm has been designing a stylish interrobang (‽) for his next new typeface and tweeted that he needs to learn how to type one. John Gruber replied with his suggestion using text replacement in MacOS. I use a similar solution using aText to make typing these unusual characters easier.
The Official Movie site for Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes has launched and, chattering chimpanzees, is it a piece of work! As if I weren’t excited enough about the film. It’s not released until July 2014 but the site gives fans a taste of what’s happened since the end of Rise.
One of the most important elements in our recent redesign is our new portfolio. We ran out of time during the redesign week and couldn’t include all of the portfolio pieces we’d planned. This week we’re adding more and while we were doing that I discovered something I hadn’t known before about large images and iOS.
Jessica Hische made Quotes & accents (& Dashes). Remembering keystrokes for these characters is hard, but for me remembering character entities is downright impossible. So I made TextExpander do the remembering for me. Here’s how I did it:
I’m Andy Clarke. I’ve spent over thirty years helping businesses, charities, and organisations create memorable websites. I’m also the author of books on web design.