One of our very favourite deals of 2013 was for the lovingly crafted Lunchbox font, from Kimmy Design. So we were delighted when we found out that our sister-site, MightyDeals.com, had managed to arrange an equally awesome deal on the companion typeface, Lunchbox Slab Serif.

The hand-drawn quality of Lunchbox Slab Serif gives it a real, honest feel. You can almost imagine a waiter chalking it up on a board.

Just like its sibling, Lunchbox Slab Serif is ideal for any project that you want to introduce a sense of wholesome fun to — ideal for signage; imagine farmers’ markets, vegetarian restaurants, icecream brands; you might even try crafting a high-class wine label with it.

All hand-drawn typefaces run the risk of losing some of the illusion of craft, as the little organic imperfections get repeated, Lunchbox Slab Serif solves this problem by providing no less than 4 alternatives for each character. So no matter what your content, you’ll always be able to maintain that hand-drawn aesthetic.

Lunchbox Slab Serif includes over 1500 different glyphs across 3 different weights. But that’s not all, you’ll also receive over 200 ornaments, each one with its own stylistic alternatives; a complete set of small caps, each with 4 variations; and a full set of swashes, designed to work with both the regular and stylistic variations.

Lunchbox Slab Serif is a superb typeface, but it’s even better when combined with its sibling Lunchbox, which also features the variations, ornaments and swashes that Lunchbox Slab Serif boasts. In case you didn’t manage to grab it first time around, MightyDeals have also extended their Lunchbox deal.

You can download the desktop version of Lunchbox Slab Serif for $17 or get the desktop and web versions for just $25, that’s an incredible saving of 72%! Its sibling Lunchbox is available for $17 for either desktop or web version, or $25 for both, which is also a 72% discount. Head over to MightyDeals.com to grab these sensational fonts today.

Have you used Lunchbox in a project? Are you excited about the release of Lunchbox Slab Serif? Let us know in the comments.

90 Pixel Perfect Royalty Free Flat Icons – only $5!

Smart home appliances could become more common thanks to efforts by major companies including Lowe’s and Staples to make gadgets compatible.

When I interviewed Tony Fadell, the inventor of the iPod and now CEO of Nest, two years ago, he told me that he started the company, which sells smart thermostats and alarms, because existing products for taking control of your home over the Internet were clunky and appealed only to the technically minded (see “Nest’s Control Freaks”). “Home automation is for single geeky guys. It’s not for families,” he said.

By Taxiarchis Botsis, Jan 28, 2014, Tuesday, 10 am, ITE 459, Department of Information Systems, UMBC

This presentation will describe the contribution of Informatics to the promotion of population health and the corresponding use of various methods for getting the most from BIG DATA. The presentation will begin with a short discussion on the disease surveillance for high risk populations using diabetics as a prototype and the nuances of handling large Electronic Health Record data. Then, the talk will focus on the post marketing safety surveillance and, particularly, the extraction of key features from spontaneous reports, the use of case classification methods, the retrieval and quantification of specific information (of interest) and the pattern recognition and signal identification from BIG DATA; certain methodologies with real examples will be presented. A new approach for the literature-based development of case definitions will be also discussed.

Brief Speaker Biography: Taxiarchis Botsis works as a Medical Informatician at the Office of Biostatistics and Epidemiology (OBE), Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) at the FDA. He is also an adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Tromsø in Norway. His background lies in the field of Medical Informatics. After receiving his MSc and PhD in Health Informatics from the University of Athens in Greece he worked on the data management of International Randomized Clinical Trials. He then received a fellowship from the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) to work as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Tromsø in Norway; at that time his main area of interest was the disease surveillance for high risk populations. He then spent one year at the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University (New York, NY) where he worked on a number of Electronic Health Record data mining projects. In 2010, he received an ORISE fellowship to work on post-marketing safety surveillance at OBE at the FDA (Rockville, MD) and, last year, he was promoted to a full-time employee. During this period he has been working on various projects and developing new approaches for improving the efficiency, effectiveness and rigorousness of safety surveillance.

Don’t miss out on the fun this February! There will be birthday celebrating, dance performances and lots of alumni spirit. For more details, see below.

True Grit’s Birthday Bash & Basketball Game
Wednesday, February 5, 6 p.m. – 9 p.m.

Celebrate True Grit’s 47th birthday! There will be a pre-game reception including birthday festivities, pictures with Gritty and fun with fellow alums. Following the party, watch the men’s basketball team take on the New Hampshire Wildcats. To learn more, visit alumni.umbc.edu/happybirthdaygrit.

Alvin Ailey Dance Theater Performance
Saturday, February 8
Pre-show reception at 6 p.m., show at 7:30 p.m.

Join the Chapter of Black and Latino Alumni at The Kennedy Center for a performance by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The performance includes captivating new works and enduring classics like Aszure Barton’s LIFT and Alvin Ailey’s Revelations. More info at alumni.umbc.edu/alvinailey.

Spirit Group Alumni Day
Saturday, February 22, 5 p.m. – 9 p.m.

Join us for the 4th annual Band, Cheer, Drumline, Fever Retrievers, Tumbling and Twirling alumni day. The event will include food, drinks, group photos, performances, men’s basketball vs. Binghamton and more. Get info at alumni.umbc.edu/spiritday.

Deadline for Papers: February 14, 2014 

predicate

(n.) - the part of a sentence or clause containing what is said about a subject

(v.) - to make an assertion; to postulate, suppose, assume

Produced by the Georgetown University English Graduate Student Association, Predicate aims to establish a forum for graduate students to share their research and writing: a place to work with other developing scholars.  

For this year’s issue, we invite submissions that investigate the act of reacting. What forms can a reaction take? How do time or historical context shape reactions to literature or events? How can a reaction impact the issue or event to which it responds? What motivates a reaction? Is reacting always a political act?

We encourage papers from all humanities disciplines including, but not limited to, philosophy, history, art history, theology, literature, women’s and gender studies, ethnic studies, and LGBTQ studies.

Submissions should be sent as Word document email attachments to Maria Vrcek (mev37@georgetown.edu) no later than 11:59 p.m. on February 14, 2014. All submissions should utilize Chicago style citation. Please do not include your name in the text of the paper. In the body of your email, include your name, your program affiliation, the title of your paper, and the subject of your paper. Papers should not exceed 6,000 words. Authors will be notified of acceptance and, if appropriate, suggestions for revision by the middle of March.

This Saturday, January 11, Jason Hughes ’15 and Gary Kachadourian ’12, imaging and digital arts, will present work in Baltimore Artists + WPA + Mera Rubell = Love, an exclusive preview that displays the artwork of those chosen for SELECT 2014 — an art auction curated by Mera Rubell, co-founder of the Rubell Family Collection.

Baltimore Artists + WPA + Mera Rubell = Love is presented by the Washington Project for the arts, and will be on display January 11 through 8, at the Marianne Boesky Gallery‘s uptown space:
118 E 64th Street
New York, NY 10065

The gallery is open Tuesday – Saturday: 10am – 6pm. Admission is free.

When it comes to optimizing websites for performance one of the biggest goals is to reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent to the browser (the payload). As images commonly make up the largest chunk of the overall page size, it’s a good idea to find ways to reduce the size of your images. There are plenty of tools available that can compress images in order to decrease the file size but you’re still limited to a certain extent by the file type. The way in which images are encoded has a big impact on the size of the resulting files.

In this blog post you’re going to learn about a new image format called WebP that aims to reduce the size of images without compromising their quality.

What is WebP?

WebP is an image format developed by Google which can reduce the file size of your images by up to 34% when compared with JPEG images. This can have a significant impact on both page load times and bandwidth usage.

Comparing JPEG and WebP Image Compression at 80% Quality. (Files: original.png, result.jpg, result.webp) Image by Luc Viator, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

After the Chrome Web Store switched to using WebP last year, the team at Google reported an average reduction of 30% in the size of images across the site. This amounts to a saving of several terabytes a day in bandwidth! Google is also currently using WebP for images on the Play Store.

The WebP format supports both lossless and lossy image compression, as well as alpha channel transparency, color profiles, metadata, and animation. This feature set starts to make WebP look like a one-stop solution for images on the web.

The importance of developing a better image format is reinforced when you think about how browsing trends have changed over the past few years. Mobile browsing now accounts for 15% of all global internet traffic and that figure is still rising. However, the networks that these mobile devices rely on for data hasn’t improved at the same rate. For much of the population mobile browsing is still restricted by low bandwidth connections that can make downloading web pages frustratingly slow. Using technologies like WebP to reduce the overall payload size of your web pages helps to alleviate some of this frustration.

Pros and Cons of Using WebP

Using WebP has many benefits over more traditional image formats like JPEG, PNG or GIF.

• Small File Size
• Increased Quality – When compared to compressing images to the same file size using other formats.
• Royalty Free – WebP was open-sourced under a BSD-style license by Google in 2010.
• One Format to Rule Them All – WebP has the ability to replace JPEG, PNG and GIF to become a single format for all images on the web.

Although WebP has been around since 2010, support is still limited. This is the main drawback of using WebP today (we’ll look at a way around this in the next section).

• Browser Support – WebP is currently supported in Chrome and Opera on the desktop. Mobile support is limited to the native Android browser and Chrome for Android. You’ll learn more about how to handle this limitation later in this post.
• Native OS Support – WebP is not currently supported natively in any operating systems. Google has primarily developed the format for the web, but there is a codec available that adds support to the Windows Imaging Component.

Note: It’s possible to use WebP images within Android and iOS apps, however in this post we’re just going to focus on web applications.

Converting Images to WebP

By now you should have some of idea of what makes WebP different and why it is a good idea to consider using it in your web applications. In this section you’re going to learn how to convert your existing images to the WebP format.

Google has developed a number of command line utilities for converting images to WebP. You can download these from the Google Developers website here. Once you have a copy of the utilities you may want to add the utilities bin folder to your local PATH. This can be done by adding the following lines to the .bash_profile file in your home directory (Mac/Linux).

PATH=$PATH:"/path/to/libwebp-utilities/bin"
    export PATH
    

You will need to update the path within the quotes to represent the location of the WebP utilities folder on your system. Once you restart your terminal you should be able to access the utilities on the command line.

Alternatively, on a Mac you can install the utilities using homebrew.

brew install webp
    

Note: Be aware that the version of the utilities available via homebrew may not always match the latest release available through the project website.

Once you have the utilities installed you can convert a JPEG or PNG image to WebP using the cwebp utility.

cwebp [options] -q quality input.jpg -o output.webp
    

The quality option should be a number between 0 (poor) and 100 (very good). A typical quality value is about 80, but you may want to play around with this until you reach a balance between file size and quality that you’re happy with.

For a full list of options that can be used with this utility run the cwebp command with the -longhelp flag, or check out the documentation.

Note: You can use the dwebp utility to convert your WebP images back to PNG, PAM, PPM or PGM images.

dwebp input_file.webp [options] [-o output_file]
    

Automatic Conversion with the PageSpeed Module

It’s great to have these utilities available to manually convert images to WebP but as we saw earlier, not all browsers support this image format yet. We need a way of serving WebP images to those that can view them, and a fallback to JPEGs or PNGs for those that can’t. You could write some elaborate server-side code that figures out whether a user’s browser supports WebP and then serves the appropriate file to them, but luckily you don’t have to.

The PageSpeed module developed by Google includes a feature that will automatically convert your images to WebP and serve them up to browsers that support the format. This works like magic and it’s pretty simple to set up. All you have to do is add a single line to your host configuration that enables this feature.

ModPagespeedEnableFilters convert_jpeg_to_webp
    

Note: If you’re not familiar with the PageSpeed module check out my previous post on how to set up mod_pagespeed on an Apache web server.

Enabling the convert_jpeg_to_webp filter will cause the PageSpeed module’s image optimizer to automatically convert and serve WebP images where appropriate. Initially this just works for JPEG images but you can add support for PNGs too by enabling the convert_png_to_jpeg filter.

ModPagespeedEnableFilters convert_png_to_jpeg
    

Google reports that over 300,000 websites are currently using the PageSpeed module (or service) to serve WebP images to users.

If you have the ability to use the PageSpeed module on your server this is a really easy way to make sure that you’re taking advantage of the benefits of WebP.

Final Thoughts

In this post you’ve learned how using the WebP image format can help to reduce the overall size of your web pages, and therefore decrease page load times. It’s evident that WebP has a number of advantages over JPEG or PNG, both in the balance between size and quality, and in the features supported by this emerging format.

Although browser support for WebP still has a lot of room for improvement, using Google’s PageSpeed module allows you to easily get the benefits of WebP without alienating user’s with browsers that don’t support the format.

For me, taking advantage of WebP through the PageSpeed module seems like a no-brainer, but what are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments below.

Useful Links

• Google Developers: WebP
• WebP: enabling faster, smarter and more beautiful web
• PageSpeed Module: Convert JPEG to WebP
• Can I Use… WebP

The post Getting Started with the WebP Image Format appeared first on Treehouse Blog.