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Vectorizing – The new ep-3 website

February 7, 2016

A new year – a new website. Not really brand new, but completely revised. New design and new foundation. And of course taken to the state of the art level of technology and knowhow. The standards for a new website for a software development company by a software development company are quite high, if you know what we mean. Not the easiest task.

ep-3 redesign

Shining in a multi-lingual fashion

We have introduced an english version of our thus far primarily german online presence. For our, uhm, international clients, of course. We are focussed on the german market though, this is why this blog is and probably will be way behind the german one in terms of posts. Unpardonable excuse, I know.

But there is something else I wanted to squeeze into this post.

Vectors instead of Bitmaps

This website heavily uses vector graphics (SVG) instead of the conventional bitmap formats (like JPG or PNG). After years of patience we are now at a point where all major web browsers support this format. And this has certainly a couple of advantages:

  • High-DPI screens, as they are built into most modern smartphones and tablets, are able to display vector graphics in full sharpness, no matter how far one zooms in or out.
  • The same vector graphics file can be used in a variety of different sizes throughout the website, from the smallest icon to the largest illustration.
    SVG sizes comparison
  • The file size of vector graphics is usually much smaller than (even compressed) bitmap files. This is important for short loading times and smooth mobile radio.
  • SVG graphics are in fact XML files, which makes them very easy to process both client- and serverside. Additionally, one can further compress them with technologies like GZIP.

Of course there are some drawbacks as well:

  • Photographs and images with lots of noise are still better saved as bitmap files.
  • Although traffic is reduced, the processor has to compute a bit more to render the graphics on demand on the screen.
  • Older web browsers have problems with SVG files. Practically relevant is especially the Internet Explorer 8 and older (which shouldn’t be supported anymore anyways).

Résumé: For logos, illustrations, icons and (stylized) layout elements, SVG graphics are absolutely nice.

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