Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

10 Things Every Web Designer Should Be Able to do in their Sleep

The Best and Worst Branding of 2015

A Tool to Find Unused Logos, You Can Use for Free

UiGradients: Dual-tone Colour Gradients for Designers & Devs

The Worst Identities of 2015

What Design Job Titles Really Mean

A Responsive Guide to Type Sizing

Getting More Work Done Without Simply Working More Hours

GoodUI Evidence: Learn About Which GoodUI Ideas Work Best

Fully Booked in Six Weeks: My Journey Out of Broke-Land

Visual Planning for Designers

Developers: 20 Ways to Challenge Yourself Come 2016

The 20 Best New Apps of 2015

7 Personalities You Need on your Design Team

25 Tips for Staying Sane as a Freelancer

Here are the Winning Photos of the 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest

Should I Use a Video as a Background?

The Secret Door – Enter the Door to Visit a Random Place in the World

Open Source Software Went Nuclear this Year

Signs that You’re a Good Programmer

Why is the Media so Afraid of Facebook?

How Reddit Took on its own Users – And Won

This was the Year the Media Started Doubting the Web

See Everyday Fonts Become Funny Portraits

Tumblr 2015 Year in Review

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

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If you have big amounts of data that you want to display in tabular shape within an HTML document, you should always keep an eye on the website’s performance. In general, it is possible to make a table with multiple hundreds or thousands of lines. However, it’s not always fun to work through a table of this length. Especially when using the mouse wheel, you will quickly notice that scrolling is not as smooth as it usually is. The amount of data in the table pressures the browser. Clusterize.js is a JavaScript library that helps with that issue by only loading and displaying certain parts of the table.

Simple concept, big impact

Clusterize.js requires that only a piece of a table is displayed within a scrollable container. Instead of all lines, you’ll only see a few lines. The container has a scrollbar, which allows you to move through the entire table. However, Clusterize.js makes sure that not the entire table is loaded. Instead, only the visible part of the table will be created in the DOM structure. As soon as someone scrolls within the table container, new table data is loaded. To make the scrollbar work, a certain height is added to the invisible areas. This allows you to scroll through the chart just like usual.

The difference is especially noticeable when dealing with huge amounts of data. The automatic reload via JavaScript makes sure that there are only a few chart lines at once. That’s the reason for the slim source and it prevents performance problems. Besides the acceleration, the user won’t notice a difference. The loading of the data happens in the background.

Loading tables via Clusterize.js

In order to be able to use Clusterize.js, you need to integrate the library’s JavaScript and stylesheet file at the end of the HTML body. Afterwards, you can choose between two loading options. When you already have a table with all lines, Clusterize.js causes the lines to be removed and saved in an array that is outside of the visible area. Alternatively, you can also mark an empty chart and directly transfer the lines as a JavaScript array. Then, the single lines need to be marked via HTML, however.

<div class="clusterize">
  <table>
    <thead></thead>
  </table>
  <div id="scrollArea" class="clusterize-scroll">
    <table>
      <tbody id="contentArea" class="clusterize-content">
        <tr class="clusterize-no-data">
          <td>Lade Daten …</td>
        </tr>
      </tbody>
    </table>
  </div>
</div>

This example shows, how a chart needs to be labelled to make it useable for Clusterize.js. Two „

“ elements are created, so that the table’s body lines can be scrolled independently from the headers. This means, that the first table contains the fixed headers. The second table, which is placed within a „

“ element.

var daten = ["<tr>…</tr>", "<tr>…</tr>", …];
var clusterize = new Clusterize({
  rows: daten,
  scrollId: "scrollArea",
  contentId: "contentArea"
});

As the table doesn’t contain any content yet, the content needs to be transferred using an array. Here, the array „data“, which contains entirely marked lines that are initiated via „

“ element, is used. This array is handed over to the „Clusterize()“ object option „rows“. When the lines are all labelled within the „

“ element, the „rows“ option is simply left out.

You can set the area that defines the scrollable area, in which the actual table is placed, by using the option „scrollId“. The chart is addressed via „contentId“.

There’s nothing else to do. Clusterize.js makes sure that the right lines are loaded and displayed automatically. The whole thing is not restricted to tables, it also works for lists. You can load sorted („

“) as well as unsorted lists („
“) the same way. Naturally, this only makes sense when you have accordingly long lists where you can expect an improved performance.

Changeable amount of lines per block

By default, there are always 50 lines loaded in one block which is then placed within the table. However, the number of lines can be set individually in the options. For example, when there are always more than 50 visible lines due to the chart’s design, you should adjust the amount of loaded lines per block accordingly.

The amount of blocks in a cluster can also be edited. By default, there is a maximum of four clusters in the table.

var clusterize = new Clusterize({
  …
  rows_in_block: 50,
  blocks_in_cluster: 4
});

There are other optional settings as well. Notably, the option to define an element to fill the table using „tag“. When no element is chosen via „tag“, Clusterize.js automatically selects a fitting one – for example, „

“ for charts and „

“ for lists. A height equivalent to the height of the not loaded table lines or list elements is assigned to these placeholder elements via the CSS attribute „height“.

Source text of a table altered with Clusterize.js: Not yet loaded lines are displayed as a line with an according height

Although the framework deals with the loading of content by itself, there are methods to update data and add new lines to a chart.

clusterize.append();

The example with the method „append()“ causes new data to be attached to the end of the table. This usually happens when scrolling down. Analogously, there is the method „prepend()“, which adds the data to the beginning. This usually happens when scrolling up.

Browser Support and Download Link

Clusterize.js works on all modern and mobile browsers, including the Internet Explorer from version 8 and up. However, there is one thing to keep in mind. The height for the not displayed content is defined via CSS. This height can end up being rather big when dealing with hundreds or thousands of chart lines. The problem is, that all browsers have different maximum values for heights. Webkit browsers, for example, can go up to around 134 million pixels, while Gecko browsers can „only“ interpret ten million pixels of height. You should keep these limits in mind.

The library is available under the liberal MIT license and can thus also be used commercially. When you want to convince yourself of the performance difference, you can find a very convincing example on the project website. You can compare a „normal“ table to a Clusterize.js optimised table there.

• Clusterize.js

* You might also be interested in the following articles

• Chartist.js Creates Responsive, Animated Charts with SVG
• [Quick Tip] Dynatable for jQuery: Static Tables Are in Danger of…
• HTML5 Brings Tables Back: Contemporary Grid Layouts with CSS Grids
• RulersGuides.js: Photoshop-inspired Web Design Helper Tool
• Lining.js: Controlling Text Lines per CSS Selector
• Web App Manifest: Open Websites Like Native Apps on Mobile Devices

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Zopfli Optimization: Literally Free Bandwidth

January 2nd, 2016 admin No comments

In 2007 I wrote about using PNGout to produce amazingly small PNG images. I still refer to this topic frequently, as seven years later, the average PNG I encounter on the Internet is very unlikely to be optimized.

For example, consider this recent Perry Bible Fellowship cartoon.

Saved directly from the PBF website, this comic is a 800 × 1412, 32-bit color PNG image of 671,012 bytes. Let’s save it in a few different formats to get an idea of how much space this image could take up:

BMP	24-bit	3,388,854
BMP	8-bit	1,130,678
GIF	8-bit, no dithering	147,290
GIF	8-bit, max dithering	283,162
PNG	32-bit	671,012

PNG is a win because like GIF, it has built-in compression, but unlike GIF, you aren’t limited to cruddy 8-bit, 256 color images. Now what happens when we apply PNGout to this image?

Default PNG	671,012
PNGout	623,859	7% smaller

Take any random PNG of unknown provenance, apply PNGout, and you’re likely to see around a 10% file size savings, possibly a lot more. Remember, this is lossless compression. The output is identical. It’s a smaller file to send over the wire, and the smaller the file, the faster the decompression. This is free bandwidth, people! It doesn’t get much better than this!

Except when it does.

In 2013 Google introduced a new, fully backwards compatible method of compression they call Zopfli.

The output generated by Zopfli is typically 3–8% smaller compared to zlib at maximum compression, and we believe that Zopfli represents the state of the art in Deflate-compatible compression. Zopfli is written in C for portability. It is a compression-only library; existing software can decompress the data. Zopfli is bit-stream compatible with compression used in gzip, Zip, PNG, HTTP requests, and others.

I apologize for being super late to this party, but let’s test this bold claim. What happens to our PBF comic?

Default PNG	671,012
PNGout	623,859	7% smaller
ZopfliPNG	585,117	13% smaller

Looking good. But that’s just one image. We’re big fans of Emoji at Discourse, let’s try it on the original first release of the Emoji One emoji set – that’s a complete set of 842 64×64 PNG files in 32-bit color:

Default PNG	2,328,243
PNGout	1,969,973	15% smaller
ZopfliPNG	1,698,322	27% smaller

Wow. Sign me up for some of that.

In my testing, Zopfli reliably produces 3 to 8 percent smaller PNG images than even the mighty PNGout, which is an incredible feat. Furthermore, any standard gzip compressed resource can benefit from Zopfli’s improved deflate, such as jQuery:

Or the standard compression corpus tests:

	Size	gzip -­9	kzip	Zopfli
Alexa­top­10k	693mb	128mb	125mb	124mb
Calgary	3.1mb	1017kb	979kb	975kb
Canterbury	2.8mb	731kb	674kb	670kb
enwik8	100mb	36mb	35mb	35mb

(Oddly enough, I had not heard of kzip – turns out that’s our old friend Ken Silverman popping up again, probably using the same compression bag of tricks from his PNGout utility.)

But there is a catch, because there’s always a catch – it’s also 80 times slower. No, that’s not a typo. Yes, you read that right.

gzip -­9	5.6s
7­zip ­mm=Deflate ­mx=9	128s
kzip	336s
Zopfli	454s

There’s a little caveat here in that gzip compression is faster than it looks in the above comparsion, because level 9 is a bit slow for what it does:

	Time	Size
gzip -1	11.5s	40.6%
gzip -2	12.0s	39.9%
gzip -3	13.7s	39.3%
gzip -4	15.1s	38.2%
gzip -5	18.4s	37.5%
gzip -6	24.5s	37.2%
gzip -7	29.4s	37.1%
gzip -8	45.5s	37.1%
gzip -9	66.9s	37.0%

It’s up to you to decide if that whopping 0.1% compression ratio difference between gzip -7and gzip -9 is worth the doubling in CPU time. In related news, this is why pretty much every compression tool’s so-called “Ultra” compression level or mode is generally a bad idea. You fall off an algorithmic cliff pretty fast, so stick with the middle or the optimal part of the curve, which tends to be the default compression level. They do pick those defaults for a reason.

PNGout was not exactly fast to begin with, so imagining something that’s 80 times slower (at best!) to compress an image or a file is definite cause for concern. You may not notice on small images, but try running either on a larger PNG and it’s basically time to go get a sandwich. Or if you have a multi-core CPU, 4 to 16 sandwiches. This is why applying Zopfli to user-uploaded images might not be the greatest idea, because the first server to try Zopfli-ing a 10k × 10k PNG image is in for a hell of a surprise.

However, remember that decompression is still the same speed, and totally safe. This means you probably only want to use Zopfli on pre-compiled resources, which are designed to be compressed once and downloaded millions of times – rather than a bunch of PNG images your users uploaded which may only be viewed a few hundred or thousand times at best, regardless of how optimized the images happen to be.

For example, at Discourse we have a default avatar renderer which produces nice looking PNG avatars for users based on the first letter of their username, plus a color scheme selected via the hash of their username. Oh yes, and the very nice Roboto open source font from Google.

We spent a lot of time optimizing the output avatar images, because these avatars can be served millions of times, and pre-rendering the whole lot of them, given the constraints of …

• 10 numbers
• 26 letters
• ~250 color schemes
• ~5 sizes

… isn’t unreasonable at around 45,000 unique files. We also have a centralized https CDN we set up to to serve avatars (if desired) across all Discourse instances, to further reduce load and increase cache hits.

Because these images stick to shades of one color, I reduced the color palette to 8-bit to save space, and of course we run PNGout on the resulting files. They’re about as tiny as you can get.

When I ran Zopfli on the above avatars, I was super excited to see my expected 3 to 8 percent free file size reduction and after the console commands ran, I saw that saved … 1 byte, 5 bytes, and 2 bytes respectively. Cue sad trombone.

(Yes, it is technically possible to produce strange “lossy” PNG images, but I think that’s counter to the spirit of PNG which is designed for lossless images. If you want lossy images, go with JPG or another lossy format.)

The great thing about Zopfli is that, assuming you are OK with the extreme up front CPU demands, it is a “set it and forget it” optimization step that can apply anywhere and will never hurt you. Well, other than possibly burning a lot of spare CPU cycles.

If you work on a project that serves compressed assets, take a close look at Zopfli. It’s not a silver bullet – as with all advice, run the tests on your files and see – but it’s about as close as it gets to literally free bandwidth in our line of work.

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Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

Day and night

Too many?

Unique squared

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

ColorSnapper 2 for Mac Collects, Adjusts, Organizes and Exports Colors – only $4.99!

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Some classy understated themes for Atom by simurai. This might be the little thing that gets me to try switching to Atom. I gotta imagine people will port them over to other apps, though.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

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DuoTone themes is a post from CSS-Tricks

Are we through with the time zones by now? I suppose so. Let me wish you all a happy new year and all the best for the coming twelve months. I hope the new year will be the start of the row of the most successful years of your life. Get rich but don’t die trying.

We here at Noupe will be at your side with helpful tips, tutorials, best practices, inspiration, reviews and the whole mixture of topics you’ve come accustomed to. We are happy to have you!

Always do what you love. That’s what they say, right? If you follow your dreams and try to make it in the field that you actually enjoy the work, then you will be good at your job and (most importantly) those long days in the office won’t feel like work. I’ve always agreed with that philosophy and it’s partly the reason why I have enjoyed some success in my career — but what happens when you are finally in that dream role and all you want to do is quit?

I have never been worried about quitting any job I’ve ever had. Not because I’m a bad employee, far from it, I always work hard and get along with people so I’m usually turning down pay rises to stay. It’s because I’ve tried to always make sure I enjoy not only what I do for a living but also the people I do it with – so it wasn’t a big deal for me to quit my comfortable position at a publishing house to join Conde Nast Digital UK as an intern a little over 4 years ago.

I remember going to the interview at Conde and my boss-to-be asking me why, with four years of experience and running the design team where I was, would I want to go back to being an intern? (on an intern’s salary and no promise of a role after 6 months). My answer was simple: I had never designed a website before and was fascinated by how a PSD becomes a live website! Plus, I loved GQ magazine. I proceeded to call him every day until he caved in and offered me a position in the team.

I had no idea what to expect working for such a huge company like Conde Nast. I had always worked at small to medium sized companies where everyone pretty much knew each other and suddenly, I was working on the 7th floor of Vogue House in London, which housed over 700 employees. I was given a desk that faced a white wall and given a temporary user name of onlinedesigner2 (one which I still use to this day).

The first few months were tough. I was just another number and was basically the design slave for the Vogue and Glamour editorial teams. I tried to just work hard and although I may not have been loving my job at that time, I was learning so much about the intricacies of designing for the web that it kept me going. I must of been doing something right as 4 months into my internship, I was offered a permanent role with the team and from there it all changed.

I gained in confidence and under the mentoring of the lead designer, we started to create some really innovative work. This was all around the time that media queries and responsive websites first started to be talked about and I remember my mind being blown when I was given a demonstration by one of our developers of how one website could change layout at different screen widths. It was also the first time I had worked with an Information Architect and I found it fascinating to see not only the stats that they would produce, analysing our users behaviours but also wireframes he would create for innovative solutions.

I started to genuinely love my job. I would come to work every day and be amazed by what the others would show me that they wanted to build and together we would figure out a way to do it. We were a mixed group of around 30 people but we all shared the passion for the products that we built, wether that was launching the fully responsive Vogue UK website or inventing an advert builder for the new fully responsive format that we created. We spent many late nights in the office with music and pizza to keep us company but it never felt forced. We were all there because we wanted to be and because we saw the value in what we were creating.

Being in a position where I genuinely looked forward to work on a Monday was brilliant for my career and saw me develop more as a designer in 3 years then I would of in 10 years somewhere else. I started to move up the ranks until I was the Senior designer of the group, responsible for guiding other designers and leaving the lead to deal with all the meetings and planning that comes with management. In hindsight, I never had it as good as I did then. Lots of responsibility but with a great boss above me who would shield us from the business pressures from the sales teams, editors or deadlines.

We were there to create work that we would be proud of and would only launch a product when it was ready. This attitude saw us create some beautiful products and completely re-think how users consume long form articles online. I remember how proud I felt after launching the GQ and Wired article templates and seeing how successful they became. Our work won us a few awards and lots of praise from our peers. It was such a special feeling to work in such an amazing team that also got along so well outside of work.

I’m sad to say that it all changed not long after. The powers that be wanted more than just having industry leading products and decided to bring in a Digital Director to monetise all of our products. Everything changed from there. We went from building prototypes of new gallery and article experiences to building micro sites for the highest bidder. A lot of people left in a very short period of time. It felt like every week we were having a leaving party for yet another integral member of the team but I guess that they were too talented to build 1 page advertorial sites.

I found myself being promoted to the Head of Design (which the ambitious side of me just couldn’t turn down) and quickly started to hate my work life. I had worked hard to finally feel like I was good at what I did and was now being told that my designing days are over and that my role was to manage the creative output for the team. The problems were that a) there wasn’t much of a team left and b) the creative output they wanted were just adverts for whichever third party brand offered the most money.

Adverts started to pop up all over our sites with little regard for what had gone on before. For instance, we had designed the gallery and article templates to only host an MPU (300x250px) or responsive adverts as we felt that hosting Double Sky adverts (300x600px) would be detrimental to the user experience on mobiles and small screens but Double Sky adverts were added wherever they could — often breaking the templates. Our websites were falling apart. They had been ignored for months in favour of concentrating on the commercial side of the business.

We basically became an agency creating bad work for anyone who would pay for it. The problem was, when you are Vogue, GQ, Glamour and Wired, there are a line of brands desperate to advertise with you which kept fuelling the fire. By now, the company was breaking a sales record every week and the management were celebrating in whatever lavish pursuit they desired that week but the websites and more importantly, the people building the websites, were on their last legs. Me included.

It genuinely upset me looking at how our sites that we spent years iterating had just become a warehouse for adverts. I had not joined as an intern to build bad micro sites for brands selling deodorant or hair products, I had joined to keep our best in class websites for the brands that I admired innovative. I decided that enough was enough and became the 12th member of a once tight knit family to leave the team.

I look back at the whole Conde Nast experience predominantly positively. I spent some of the best years that I have had in any job there with some of the kindest and most talented people that tought me so much. I rarely visit any of the sites anymore as it genuinely pains me to see what has become of them and although I’m sure they are still a cash cow, how much longer until even the smaller brands stop advertising and you are left with a once beautiful but war torn product that is miles behind the competition?

I never chose to design because I wanted to be rich. I design because I enjoy making beautiful products that enhance people’s lives. I’ve learnt that although I am ambitious and always want to develop, my sweet spot was and always will be that beautiful senior designer position. It’s great to make money but at what cost? Working 14 hour days, building products that I was embarrassed of with the memories of how great it used to be finally broke me and it’s taken me a long break and lots of travel to even start to be inspired enough to get back into designing.

Cliche: A Beautiful Hand-Lettered Brush Font – only $7!

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