[Up: Design lab] [Robot Wisdom home page]
Almost all web image-galleries are indexed via very, very, very slow-loading screens full of thumbnails, each under 100-by-100 pixels, most around 10k each. [eg: Drew Barrymore]
Even after you've allowed ten minutes for every last thumb to display, you still can hardly tell which images are worth checking out in greater detail, and each of your guesses will add another minute to the process.
This design is flawed for mathematical reasons, having to do with image compression and network latency:
When you drop much below 20k per image, the amount of detail you can see in the image declines much faster than the savings in loadtime.
What I suggest instead is:
Example: http://www.robotwisdom.com/net/goldshow/ana1.html
The most important thing is to have decent image-shrinking software, that will compress images without unnecessary loss of quality. PhotoShop's "Image Quality: Low" setting (for jpegs) is fine for most photos on the Web. (GIFs should never be used for thumbnails of photos, only for computer-generated images, ie where you can count the number of distinct colors.)
Special topics:
surfing-skills :
url-hacking :
open content :
semantics :
pagelength :
linktext :
startpages :
bookmarklets :
weblogging :
colors :
autobiographical pages :
thumbnail-graphics :
web-video :
timeline of hypertext
Anti-XML/W3C/etc:
structure-myth :
page-parsing :
firstcut-parser :
html-history :
semantic web
Design prototypes:
topical portal :
dense-content faq :
annotated lit :
random-access lit-summary :
poetry sampler :
gossipy history :
author-resources :
hyperlinked-timeline :
horizontal-timeslice :
web-dossier
Website-resource pages:
RobotWisdom.com :
Altavista.com :
1911encyclopedia.com :
Google.com :
IMDb.com :
Perseus.org :
Salon.com :
Yahoo.com
Older stuff:
design-lab :
design-checklist :
HyperTerrorist :
design-theory :
design cog-sci
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