I’m asking because someone contacted me with a question and it’s been a while since I’ve heard a reference to slicing images. Plus, Photoshop seems to be steering away from slicing in the workflow.
I haven’t used slicing in awhile, but I haven’t done any interface design in awhile either. I haven’t used Adobe XD, but I’m assuming that it’s a factor. I don’t know if XD does slicing, but it probably does.
Slicing is only necessary for raster graphics, which aren’t efficiently scalable and require more bandwidth. If slicing is on the decline, it may be due to an increase of vector graphics in interfaces. Vector graphics don’t need to be sliced because they are separate objects in form.
I figured it would be a matter of time before vector graphics became dominant back in the 1990’s with the low bandwidth. I’m still surprised that Flash didn’t take over the web back then, because it had the bandwidth problems solved. I guess it was too far ahead of it’s time and then mishandled when Adobe took it over.
Was it Adobe mishandling that killed Flash or Apple’s refusal to support it on the iPhone?
(That’s pretty much a rhetorical question.)
Both. But it was more Adobe’s opportunity to squander than it was Apple’s power to kill Flash. I suspect Adobe’s real reason to allow Flash to die was because it wasn’t built on Adobe PostScript. It was built on SmartSketch.
1 Like
Slicing up a big Photoshop file and gluing it back together with HTML was never a good technique. A Photoshop mockup from which various elements can be cut and used, however, is still used. I suppose that might be referred to as image slicing, but it’s different from the old process of just using a big, sliced-up raster file as a web page.
The big difference here is that one (raster or vector) slice has a transparent background while the raster table-based method doesn’t.
I suspect image slicing is still in regular use among those designing html emails. But I could be wrong.
I am in Illustrator when needing to create an Image Map …or when I’m slicing up an image into multiple SVGs for an interactive info graphic.
Slicing up SVGs?
Did I write those exact words …Just-B?
Try again.
Flash died because it sucked. It was a buggy, proprietary format that was more about visual gimmickry than it was about providing information that website visitors wanted. It also took far more time to create a Flash animation that it did to produce equivalent web pages. It was also difficult to update and it didn’t fit into the opensource nature of the Internet.
Flash didn’t die because Apple killed it. Apple was just the company who finally stepped up to the plate and put it out of its misery.
1 Like
It had it’s problems, but it had more potential in the 1990’s than most people recognized. The bugs could have been fixed.
Apple killed it because Apple didn’t own it. If they had of owned it, they would have improved on it.
In the end, Macromedia had the most control over the destiny of Flash. It was just easier for them to take the money and run than it would have been to fight Adobe and Apple in a format war. Now we are stuck with an Adobe Monopoly and Information Technology professionals calling most of the shots as to how graphic designers should do business, while we wait for HTML5 SVG animations to catch up to where Flash was decades ago.
/rant
No, but I couldn’t understand what you wrote, so I asked for clarification (in an equally confusing way, it seems).
1 Like
Exactly. Didn’t do much for SEO, either.
I took several Flash classes early on, and decided that if this is how animation is done, I’m not interested. 
It’s not often that I disagree with you, but I totally disagree on this one. Flash was obsolete and destined to an early death from the moment Macromedia acquired FutureSplash and renamed it.
It had almost nothing going for it other than the ability for designers to create eye candy. The files were large, slow, buggy, difficult to build, were an SEO nightmare and were a giant nuisance to anyone using the web. And as I mentioned, it was a proprietary piece of software layered onto the web in a way that completely ran against the entire semantic nature of the W3C’s guidelines for structuring information.
Is that why it’s still around 2.5 decades later?
. . . reads a bit terse for a case in which you could have just explained it better in the first place.
Okay, so there are your exact words. They suggest (assuming we’re all still talking about ‘image slicing’) you slice up a raster image and save the slices as SVG’s. Is that right? If so, why?
Should’ve tried Director. I loved that app. Much more fertile for the learning animator.
1 Like
There are a few dusty corners where it’s still being used.
Is it still an in-demand skill? I’ve never seen local classes offer it, but I’d be open to further investigation.