Designing for Performance: Weighing Aesthetics and Speed

Lara Callender Hogan

Dec 2014 · "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

About this ebook

As a web designer, you encounter tough choices when it comes to weighing aesthetics and performance. Good content, layout, images, and interactivity are essential for engaging your audience, and each of these elements have an enormous impact on page load time and the end-user experience. In this practical book, Lara Hogan helps you approach projects with page speed in mind, showing you how to test and benchmark which design choices are most critical.

To get started, all you need are basic HTML and CSS skills and Photoshop experience.

Topics include:

• The impact of page load time on your site, brand, and users
• Page speed basics: how browsers retrieve and render content
• Best practices for optimizing and loading images
• How to clean up HTML and CSS, and optimize web fonts
• Mobile-first design with performance goals by breakpoint
• Using tools to measure performance as your site evolves
• Methods for shaping an organization’s performance culture

About the author

Lara Callender Hogan is the Senior Engineering Manager of Performance at Etsy and the author of Designing for Performance. She champions performance as a part of the overall user experience, striking a balance between aesthetics and speed, and building performance into company culture.