h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've been looking at the layout on the Radio 4 site.

There is no way images that size will work here.

Those pictures are 570 pixels across. We can't put that over the top of an Entry. With the side bars (I'll assume we're keeping the links and credits, at least) and everything, the site will not fit on a small (netbook or simply low-res) screen.

Or are the huge images just for the FP? So there will be a reduced-size version for the Entry, with lost detail, where it's actually visible for more than a day, but we have to design them for that ridiculous size anyway? Shrinking photographs works better than shrinking drawings; the latter blur more.

If you want to keep using volunteer-created images, it will be a problem because the entire process will become much, much slower. For something that size, we Community Artist will need more detail to fill it, will need to work more carefully and at a much larger initial size... I'm not sure I even want to spend a full day on an illustration when I could be devoting that day to, say, my comics. The photographers might be able to cope better, but we know they can't work ahead, so the images just won't be there for the Front Page.

Also, there's no way we're going to get *those* down to under 20KB - 80KB will be pushing it for jpgs without a lot of texture. And why display images that big if the quality will be poor?

I don't imagine the idea is to use pictures that big in the body of Entries, but for the Front Page.

I'd like to echo everything Mal has said, there. We have recently had the situation where illustrations - and illustrators - have been quite thin on the ground, so much so that Entries with pictures available have hopped straight to the Front Page without being sub-edited. If the workload for illustrating increases, it simply won't work with the resources we have now.

It seems to indicate that we will have to

a) Use a lot more generic, bland stock images for the FP
b) Change the appearance of the FP a lot less frequently
c) Recruit a lot more Community Artists and Photographers **and keep them active**, which is hard enough at the minute and won't get any easier if it becomes even more work.

or

d) Rely more heavily on BBC staff resources.

a) and b) don't strike me as desirable at all. c) would be fantastic, but it's very unlikely. I'm not sure about the feasibility of d), but I realise resources in that line are limited, too.

I'm afraid they're just for the FP, too.

And putting that much work into something to be displayed for 24 hours before disappearing is a bit...less than ideal.

Well, quite - would it even be possible to do more than 1-2 a week given the extra size and detail? It would be good to hear a little bit more about what the intentions are.

True, true. Maybe we should e-mail the group?

Found this on the email to the group

Surely there are better formats to use than .jpg? Gif are clearer and smaller so why not use them or why not use .png as I think Mala said somehwhere else. Of course if the picture is a square on both the FP and then entry what about scalable vector graphics .svg? I've never used them but have seen them in use as thumbnails etc that have then become a lot bigger, but not sure how practical this would be

Internet Explorer doesn't understand SVG without a plugin. Firefox does, but they need to be included as objects, not as normal images. Basically, keep away from SVG for the time being,

TRiG.

Cheers TRiG

Gifs are only useful for certain types of pictures, because dithering has its limits. It would be nice to be able to use both, though!

Pngs would be useful for smileys because they can have multi-channel transparency, but if we're still doing a rectangular image with a black border, there's no real reason to use png - gif does the same thing, but with better support in IE.

While vector graphics would solve the problem of bigger pictures for the FP, we'd all have to learn a new way of drawing, so I'm not sure how useful they would be!

would the vector graphics have to keep their sides the same length relative to each other? (aspect ration?)

Why would you want to change them? Then it'll all be distorted.

So you could have one picture that would go on the entry as well as on the front page and you could scale it up.

What does scaling up have to do with not keeping aspect ratios?

Well if you lengthened one side and not the other then the picture would look odd wouldn't it?

I'm probably mixing up two different things here

Yes, it would. And yet it sounds like that's what you want to do, for some strange reason

Never mind then. Either way it looks like its easier to stick with the gifs and jpgs and png if they're feeling kind

Hello all,

First of all, the new large FP graphic is part of our shift towards the latest BBC visual guidelines. You can see that the layout with the larger graphic already appears on other BBC pages. On some it's substantially larger. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/ They are looked at by a User Experience Design Team who make decisions on how the site looks on other computers and so on.

We haven't been given designs for the new pages yet, and all our designs for the front page itself are on paper, so we can't give you answers on this yet. However, a couple of points:

As we have mentioned elsewhere, due to headcount issues and the new structure of the front page (which has more tabs attached, therefore more promos in one), we are going to shift our focus to having a front page that alters once a week. This mean that graphics would be up on the front page for a week.

Most importantly of all though: volunteering should be fun, and we absolutely don't want anybody to do anything that becomes stressful or feels like a 'job' or something they dread. We love the images provided by our Community - they enhance the Guide so much - but if we run short of them then that is a problem that we should have to deal with in-house.

Anyway - hopefully we'll have more details for you soon re layout. In the meantime,

h2g2 Editors

guys