Forum Moderators: phranque
I'm working on my first serious website project, and am happy with the site logo I've designed, but... it's 26K in size! And yes, it's a GIF.
I designed it in GIMP. The most irritating thing is, the drop shadow, which I feel adds a subtle yet positive effect, added more than 10K to the image size.
I've scoured the web, looking at numerous well-established sites, and I even have trouble finding site logos bigger than 6K! The record I think is 12K, which is still less than half the size as mine!
Is 26K quite simply too big for a site logo? Or am I making a mountain out of a molehill?
Welcome to WebmasterWorld!
If you have (or expect) a lot of first-time visitors to your site, then a 26kB logo will add 3.8 seconds to the load time of your page for users on 56kb dial-up.
I specified "first-time visitors" above because repeat visitors may have a copy of your logo in their browser cache, and so will not see the extra delay every time.
Note also that kB is kilobytes, and kb is kilobits, 8 bits to a byte, 1024 bytes to a kilobyte, and 1000 bits to a kilobit*, in case my math seems off.
* When discussing memory utilization, strict powers of two are used, thus the 1024. When discussing transmission speeds, the regular definition of kilo=1000 is used. Don't ask me why -- It's just so.
The biggest logo on any of my sites is 5kB. You might want to reduce the size of the image and/or decrease the number of colors in order to reduce the filesize.
Jim
Is 26K quite simply too big for a site logo? Or am I making a mountain out of a molehill?
From a less technical stand point than JD. I would simply answer yes. 26k is huge for a logo. 26k is quite big for a page + logo
The drop shadow effect is so widely (and sometimes miss) used that it has become a webdesign cliché. A good logo should work without one. So the answer is to ditch the effect and focus on your content instead.
I think you may have come at the logo from the wrong direction - sitting down and just designing a logo that looks good is not really the best way to go.
The way you need to approach it is from the angle of what you can do within the limitations of the medium - small file size, all of the logo suitable either for gif or jpg etc. It is amazing how creative you can be, are forced to be, when you set limits and parameters like that.
that said, it really shouldnt be adding 10k to your file size. A lot of the compression in a gif depends on how many colours are used, and in my experience, you rarely need more than 4-5 shdes of grey (assuming the shadow is over a white bg) to create the effect.
Ive never used the gimp, but wonder if it has a color table option in the gif compression options. If so, try removing shades of grey or other colors one by one to get that file size down.
Ben
Chip-
Inspired by the advice, already I have managed to get the file size down to 12K. Essentially I was just being an idiot. My precise set up was as follows: I had a background image, and on top of this the logo image. Initially I was saving the logo as a GIF, so that it could be transparent. But that was the problem - whenever I got it successfully transparent, the drop shadow would mysteriously vanish. This was all the more weird because, to my knowledge, the drop shadow was part and parcel of a non-background layer.
I ended up being forced to actually insert as a background layer that part of the background image that was supposed to be visible behind it - hence the 26K size. But of course, now it didn't need to be transparent, and I finally worked that out. So I saved as a JPEG, and with no noticeable depreciation in quality whatsoever, I am now down to 12K! :)
A 12K logo isn't that bad, is it? I mean, PokerStars has their logo at 13K, and furthermore they use images for each of their buttons (which I don't), so can I be reasonably satisfied for now?
I, too, have a "purist" in me (but hath strayed from the path on many occasions.) Purists would tell you 26K is too large, and yes, I agree, smaller is better, faster is better, yes, yes, yes.
So off I go on a few tasks that involve looking at some sites. Educational sites. Government organization sites. Sites who's primary concern should be speed, accessability, standards, sites that should be examples of everything mentioned in this thread.
With this thread in mind I began checking sizes. And what do I find: 226K. 140K. 76K. 330K. I had to really work at it to find an image, logo, or nav graphic that DIDN'T exceed 50K in size. And mind you, I was spot-checking just a few images on the pages. This is not a cumulative size for the entire page.
So Kuyler, just the fact that you're THINKING about it and TRYING to optimize for your users is good. Many don't. (I shy away from saying MOST, but I REALLY want to.) If you exceed your set goals for a size, your site won't die. Just give it a go and get it as small as you can.
