Imaging Index

The Web brought images to the Internet, admittedly with mixed reviews. How, what and when to use images is a large part of designing for the Web. Imaging for the web usually consists of compressing and formatting photos, and to a lesser extent, doing the same with vector graphics. These get used for illustrations and background images.

The tools I use are Adobe™ Photoshop and ImageReady, and Adobe™ Illustrator. Other image editors can do some, even a lot of what Photoshop can do, but when the going gets weird, the weird turn Photoshop. Macromedia™ Fireworks is a nice piece of software in lieu of ImageReady (which comes bundled with Photoshop). Macromedia’s Freehand is a vector drawing application similar to Illustrator. I’ll try to explain as much why I’m doing things as how, to make the techniques more readily adaptable.

As far as platforms go, all of the applications mentioned are pretty platform-neutral. I use Mac, but this stuff works the same on other platforms, with some keyboard equivalents being different. Nothing new if you’ve read more than a couple of design books.

With the recently (as of December 2005) completed acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe, it remains to be seen how things will pan out. Most see Fireworks expiring in favor of ImageReady, and Dreamweaver either replacing or melding into Adobe’s GoLive, which has been playing a long second in working drag and drop web editors. As of 2008, Fireworks is available (as part of CS4), but in what form, I don't know. Imageready is gone, sort of replaced by some functionality in the save for web dialogues in PS and Illustrator.

All that being said, I sound like an Adobe shill. There are other apps that can do (mostly) what you need to create and compress images for web use. For Macintosh, there’s iPhoto, Pixelmator, and Acorn. A look around, and you may get around Photoshop and Illustrator. It depends on your overall needs.