Anyone know of any good slicing n' dicing tutorials?

Can't find?

[madcat]

Hey everyone--

I'm using Fireworks because Photoshop is too much for my old battle hog. Has anyone found a good tutorial for slicing images and laying them out on a Web page. I've looked and I really can't find any good thorough reads on it. Doesn't the code this produces look awful(dunno, just asking)?

While I'm at it: Does anyone lay their site out in the program and use just the individual elements within tables rather than slicing n' dicing.

Still, I would like to know how this process works.

Thanks for your time;)

[jatar_k]

I use fireworks and photoshop to lay everything out and then cut it up and use tanles to create my own templates. I dislike the code from fireworks or image ready. It is a little faster when they do it but only by a hair ;)

When I work with designers I just spec it out for them ie pixel widths for different elements etc and then when I get it I just cut her up with a million guides and put it back together with HTML.

<added>
I don't know of any tutorials, sorry, I was just teaching someone here how to do that yesterday

(edited by: jatar_k at 7:22 pm (utc) on April 26, 2002)

[mivox]

Does anyone lay their site out in the program and use just the individual elements within tables rather than slicing n' dicing

Yep. The less "square footage" of graphics you have per page, the quicker the page will download. I haven't used a sliced graphic in a long time, once I realized how much zippier my pages were with only the minimum of actual graphic files per page.

When I did use sliced graphics though, I just kept notes of the pixel dimensions (height/width) of each slice as I saved it, and built an html table with the cells in those specific pixel dimensions...

[glowingdesigns]

I use LView and the built in slicer that comes in Paint Shop Pro 7. This site was just built using the images sliced... [heartfeltmemories.net...]

Amy
[glowingdesigns.com...]

[tedster]

I worked on one site where the separate slices were each positioned absolutely. That works rather well in some cases, and it also avoids some of the browser peculiarities that come with tables.

The only time I slice these days is when it gives me bandwidth savings - as in one area compresses better as a gif and another area works best as a jpg. Recently reduced a client's 58kb original file (one big gif) down to 23kb by slicing off a separate jpg area, and reducing the remaining gif palette to 8 colors.

That's the kind of thing slicing is excellent for. When an image works best as a gif or a jpg takes some study, and playing around with how various images work in your software. Sometimes a photo still works better as a gif! And sometimes big flat areas of color still work better as a jpg if there are other factors in parts of the image.