CMYK thumbnailing of JPEGs with Gmail/Google Mail

I peri­od­i­cally freak out when review­ing emails that I’ve sent, par­tic­u­larly to print­ers, using Gmail’s (hosted apps) web­mail inter­face. It has this habit of con­vert­ing CMYK JPGs to RGB thumb­nails really badly — but with­out appar­ent corruption.

Gmail getting CMYK thumbnails wrong

The blue in the image above is actu­ally a deep red!

Accord­ingly, while the colours are totally out of whack, there are no other arti­facts in the image. Nor­mally this just looks weird — some­times, in the case of logo vari­ants, it looks plau­si­ble but utterly incor­rect! My guess is they’re using an older ver­sion of PIL (we all know how much Google loves Python) prior to this March 2009 patch. Sounds like the same phenomenon.

Still, those peo­ple email­ing CMYK JPGs has to be a lit­tle bit niche, so I’m not heaps hope­ful of this get­ting fixed too soon! The main rea­son I care is because web inter­faces are so much faster than retriev­ing large attach­ments from IMAP stores.

# by Josh on September 16th, 2009 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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New EvolvedHD website: appropriately widescreen!

My friends over at EvolvedHD just launched a new web­site for their bur­geon­ing event pro­duc­tion empire down in Vic­to­ria. It’s a clear, clean microsite with a clear pre­sen­ta­tion of ser­vices offered and an effec­tive call to action with con­tact infor­ma­tion promi­nently fea­tured on every page (there are only four!)

New EvolvedHD site

Notably, the site is very wide (>1200px). As the web evolves we are observ­ing an ever increas­ing stan­dard width for desk­top ver­sions of web­sites — for some, this poses cur­rent issues as indi­vid­u­als grad­u­ally shift to widescreen plat­forms. For oth­ers, it rep­re­sents the inex­orable march away from old tech­nolo­gies towards the new!

While this poses cer­tain prob­lems for mobile clients, etc., even these devices are increas­ingly capa­ble of either lin­earis­ing or pro­vid­ing use­ful inter­faces (multi-touch, etc.) for mak­ing screen con­tent acces­si­ble in mobile con­texts. Here, the need for good infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture cries out even louder than tech­ni­cal con­sid­er­a­tions. Brows­ing the Inter­net mobile is an ardu­ous task on even mobile web­sites, so the best thing you can do as an author is reduce the nec­es­sary depth of con­tent to make infor­ma­tion rapidly acces­si­ble for all user agents.

In the case of the EvolvedHD web­site, the inclu­sion of con­tact details at the top left of every page effec­tively ful­fills all likely appli­ca­tions of their web­site in a mobile context.

Con­sider more than just the desk­top when design­ing your web­site. Increas­ingly, even low-depth web­sites are being called upon for mobile access as peo­ple seize the con­ve­nience of any­where, any­time Inter­net. Stop mak­ing your users jump through hoops, and start giv­ing them what they want, sooner. It’ll do won­ders for your Internet-based business.