I noticed recently that The MacArthur Foundation named its 24 MacArthur Fellows for 2009. For those that don’t know what I am talking about, these are the awards that are often dubbed “genius grants” by the media…where people with unique talents, ideas and gifts are given money to basically play and further explore whatever field of study happens to interest them.
In my wildest dream of dreams, somebody someday nominates me for a Fellowship, the selection committee chooses me as one of its recipients, and then I have five years where I don’t have to worry as much about generating income…and can focus on really building all of this GraphicsOptimization content right! Well that…as well as my continued efforts to build what my seven-year old daughter calls “Daddy’s Death Ray,” AKA using Fresnel lenses and rocks to heat and purify water for home-heating and human consumption. 
Alas, I’m sure I’m not even a tiny blip on the radar of the individuals who serve on the nomination and selection committees…so I’ll have to keep working 12-14 hours/day, six days/week to eek out just enough of a living to keep all our designers at mapformation employed while keeping a roof over my family’s head and food on the table. My mind does occasionally wander to those Fellowships though…as I’m not sure they would ever have a Fellow work harder to earn that grant money if the planets ever aligned and I were lucky enough to be considered.
Okay, head out of the clouds and back down here on Earth! Image optimization! While I was on the MacArthur web site, I figured that I might as well take a look under the hood to see what might be done to improve the performance of their site. I selected eight “nav” images on the site, to see what might be done.
Eight unoptimized .gif buttons – 8.12 KB
Eight optimized .png buttons – 6.00 KB
Here is an example of where a CSS image sprite would make a lot of sense! However, for the purposes of this exercise, I kept “apples to apples” and simply optimized the eight images as separate files. A quick conversion from .gif to 8-bit .png format for all eight images using PNGOUTWin, followed by some further optimization work in PNGSlim, took 8.12 KB of imagery and reduced it to 6.00 KB in cumulative size, an improvement of 26 percent.
Modest file size and bandwidth savings in this particular instance (2.12 KB per page view with an empty browser cache). However, every little bit helps…and if we can pull 26 percent out of those sample images without changing their appearance on-screen, I’m confident we could do a lot to improve the dozens of other image files that are found on the MacArthur Foundation web site as well.
Congratulations 2009 Fellows! May you use your “extra” bit of resources wisely to continue to make a positive impact on our planet.
