livebooks blog

Every project brings forth new and creative ways in which professionals evolve; it’s a matter of overcoming obstacles and facing challenges. This creative evolution is obvious to the ones who live it, if not for the outcome, then surely from the set of skills acquired in the process. New skills mean a new perspective on future work and the ability to take on projects that were once cast to the side.

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The Internet is full of GIFs, and for good reason – they are the perfect image format to portray a visual loop compressed in a very small size. They go well with the widespread mobile usage – their loading time is short and they use very little mobile data. They are easy to share and embed, whether in blog posts, chatting and, yes, as part of your portfolio website, too.

GIFs are not usually known for their high quality, but they can render 256 colors in 8-bit color images. That’s why, the sharper looking GIFs you might commonly find online portray mostly geometrical figures, logos or 3D renders. This is the general tone set by the majority of GIF posters, but that’s not all GIFs can be.

The greatest thing about your GIFs is that they can create a meaningful context or portray emotions. They create an unseen bond with the viewer and a sense of fulfilled expectation. They are super easy to add to your liveBooks website. These reasons alone should convince you to at least give GIFs a chance to be part of your portfolio.

Create GIFs from photos

Adobe Photoshop is the best tool to use when the source of your GIFs is your image gallery. Head over to the Adobe help page for a short and great tutorial on how to create animated GIFs from your images. The plus side of using your dedicated software when creating GIFs from images is quality control in a private medium.

Use snippets from your videos

Sharing videos is great, but creating GIF teasers from your videos to add them to your home page grid gallery is ten times as awesome. You can create GIFs from videos in Photoshop, and the link in our previous paragraph has a section dedicated to that.

You can also use online GIF creators such as Giphy – it creates GIFs from your YouTube or Vimeo videos, but you can also upload your video source from your computer. While the resulting GIFs come in good quality and don’t have a watermark, each time you create a GIF it is automatically uploaded to the Giphy library.

GIFs on your liveBooks site

You can add GIFs to your site just like you do with any other image – add them to your image collection or straight to the image block. They act like any other image, so you can adjust their widths, add overlays or hover effects, or even set them as backgrounds.

Our suggestion is to use them in grid type galleries, where their size is usually smaller. This way they will create the awesome dynamic effect without looking too grainy.

The pronunciation debate

You can say it like in gift, or like the peanut butter Jif – the debate is still on. But one thing’s for sure, regardless of how you want to pronounce it, you should give GIFs a try on your website.

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You might have noticed the images on your website display different colors depending on the browser you’re viewing them from, or whether you’re using a mobile device. The differences are subtle and they are more in the lines of saturation, but they’re there. And while you don’t know what device your clients are using or whether their screens are calibrated, you need to do your best when saving your images for the web to reach a satisfying compromise. The source of these slip-ups can be tracked down to how your images are converted and whether or not they contain an ICC profile.

sRGB and ICC Profile

In the pre-mobile times, all monitors and browsers were presented with pretty much the same color scheme – Standard Red Green Blue. If you saved your images in sRGB, it was likely your images looked the same on all browser desktop versions and on all monitors.

Now, with the introduction of tablets and smartphones, another layer of identifying and displaying color has become available, but only on desktop – the ICC Profile. You must enable the Color Profile in your image editor software when you save the image for web. This will enable all browsers to read your image settings as they truly are, and thus, display them correctly.

Alas, the mobile devices still use mainly sRGB, with the exception of Safari for iOS, which also reads ICC Profiles. So before you save the image, make sure to convert it to sRBG.

The Firefox singularity

While Firefox is designed to interpret ICC profiles, its default display values are as of this time inaccurate. Perhaps a future update will fix this value, but for now, here’s what you ca do to force the browser to read the proper ICC profiles.

Write about:config in the address bar and gfx in the search bar that appears below. Look for gfx.color_management.mode and click on it to change the value from 2 to 1.

This will activate a complete color management in Firefox and if your images contain ICC profiles they should be displayed correctly on your monitor.

Unfortunately, until there will be a unification of display settings for all monitors and all browsers and platforms, small differences are bound to appear. And since you cannot control what device your clients are using when viewing your images, you have to do your best to set them up in the most common format: saving them in sRGB and adding an ICC Profile to each of them.

Wondering how you can change the background on your website? This quick tutorial will help you get started! The liveBooks8 platform offers you the option to change your background on a site-wide or page by page level. The site-wide option will change the background on every page you have on your website. This will also affect any new page that is added onto the website.

If you would like to change the background on a single page or have different backgrounds throughout your website, the page level would be the best option for you.

Note that whether you choose to change your background on a site-wide or page by page level, you will be able to choose a solid color, a pattern, or upload a custom image.  If you decide to upload a custom background file, please adhere to our image sizing guide. This can be found by following this link.

Is there a new liveBooks feature that you are excited to learn more about? Let us know at social@livebooks.com.

Original Blog Post 10/2016.