Ian Swenson .com

Imaging

Images and graphics are so terribly important to the internet nowadays. You simply cannot get by without cohesive design, great content, and contributing images. Working with images means that you need software that can do more than Microsoft Paint©.

The program I use almost exclusively is Adobe Photoshop CS3. I also use Adobe Illustrator CS3 for the occasional vector graphics, but I can’t draw worth beans and Photoshop has almost the same vector functionality I get out of Illustrator anyway.

Now I understand if you don’t have access to Photoshop. It is a spendy, spendy program. Fortunately, you’re not completely gimped. There is a free, open-source option: GIMP!

I’ve never used GNU Image Manipulation Program, but have heard nothing but great things about it. It’s nearly as potent as Photoshop without the price. Also, if you’re into vectors (which, briefly, is using math instead of pixels for graphics making them infinitely scalable) there’s Inkscape as a free alternative to Illustrator.

All of my graphics tutorials will be tailored for Photoshop in this series, so if you can snag a copy of it, that’d be a great help! Otherwise there’s great support for GIMP out there and I’m sure you’ll have no trouble following along.

Browsers

Unfortunately, not all web browsers were created equal. There’s Firefox, Opera, Safari, lots of other minor browsers, and then Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer, or IE as it is unaffectionately referred to here, is like the annoyingly yippy purse dog of the browser dog kingdom. They’re seemingly ubiquitous, but no one in their right mind actually enjoys it. IE is popular because it comes packaged with Windows. Period. No other reason, certainly none based on merit. IE has managed to muck most things up with web design, but it must be taken seriously because ~75% of internet users use it. We can get to those that rant later, I suppose.

My point is that you’ll need lots of browsers for testing purposes. Most web pages do not look the same in Firefox and IE (and IE is the one screwing it up 99% of the time). So you need to know how a page behaves differently in each browser so you can make adjustments.

Installing multiple browsers is fairly straightforward except when it comes to multiple versions of IE. The Counter has June 2008 stats at 41% IE7, 37% IE6, 16% Firefox, 3% Safari, 1% Opera, and less than 2% all others. While IE7 is an improvement over IE6, it still didn’t fix many of the fundamental flaws (which IE8 will purportedly do). So you need both IE6 and IE7 running on the same machine for testing. Doing this is a bit out of the depth of this article, so I point you here.