As I eluded to in my October 7 posting, one of the really interesting products I was introduced to at the 2009 NACIS annual meeting was Ortellius, which is described on their web site as “powerful map illustration software” designed exclusively for the Macintosh platform. Jill Saligoe-Simmel of at MapDiva.com did an excellent job of demonstrating the tool…and some of the features built into their solution leave Adobe Illustrator FAR behind in complexity and ease-of-use.
I was particularly impressed with their Automatic Junctions and Linear Select™ functionality. There are other features that got a few oohs and aahs from those in attendance at the session…but those two features were really, really nice.
I also talked with Jill a bit over lunch about my work with image optimization…so I thought it might be fun to take a look at a handful of images from their homepage as an illustration of what is truly possible related to efficient file sizes and bandwidth savings. Below are a few examples of their imagery:
Unoptimized 570×350 pixel .png graphic – 160 KB
Optimized 570×350 pixel .jpg graphic – 71.7 KB
Unoptimized 570×350 pixel .png graphic – 98.8 KB
Optimized 570×350 pixel .jpg graphic – 29.9 KB
Unoptimized 950×350 pixel .png graphic – 214 KB
Optimized 950×350 pixel .png graphic – 51.1 KB
Unoptimized 950×350 pixel .jpg graphic – 106 KB
Optimized 950×350 pixel .jpg graphic – 34.8 KB
This was one instance where converting from .png to .jpg format (on two of the images) resulted in a dramatic decrease in file size. I think sometimes people read some of the optimization resources out there and just assume that .png = good, .jpg = bad. When it comes to drawn imagery, that is generally true…for 8-bit imagery! However, for images with 24-bit color, .jpg is generally a superior option.
I ran the various images through a combination of xat.com’s Image Optimizer and PNGSlim. After about 4-5 minutes of effort, 580 KB of imagery was able to be reduced to 187 KB in cumulative size, an improvement of 68 percent.
I’d love to look under the hood and play a bit with the imagery that makes up their graphical user interface (GUI) for Ortellius! However, a two-thirds reduction in bandwidth consumption on a sample set of imagery from their home page is a pretty exciting start to hopefully convincing Jill and Graham to investigate this issue further.
If you’re a Mac user and looking for a good tool to make some interesting map designs, give Ortellius a try. Alas, I’m on a Windows platform, so I can’t use their product. However, if anyone has any comments about that software, feel free to share them here. Thanks!
Hi Derek,
Thank you for taking an interest in Ortelius and looking at where we can improve with image optimization. I was truly inspired by your presentation and the efficiencies we can gain by this. We’ll definitely be following up!
Left by Jill Saligoe-Simmel on October 16th, 2009