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Sometimes I come across sites that are different than others in terms of quality. For example (sorry for the ad), http://www.taskrabbit.com/ . The image quality is perfect, everything "shines" and the text,buttons, background is also super quality.

How it's made? What's the secret?

Thanks

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The "secret" is to hire a skilled professional designer who knows what he's doing. There are no shortcuts in life. If you want a professional web design, then you need to be willing to pay for it (either in money paid to a skilled professional, or in time/money/hard-work to become a professional yourself). – Lèse majesté Jan 11 '11 at 14:05

3 Answers

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There's no secret, they've just made some good design decisions and got someone in who knows how to use Photoshop.

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They are professionals. As Steve mentions there is no 'secret' other than a combination of talent and experience. Designers who know how to present information and how to combine colours. As well as image editors/designers who know how to make colourful images and do so in a way that minimises the file size.

If you don't have those skills then you need to hire someone to do them for you to achieve similar quality. Also use services such as I Stock Photo and 99 Designs to get quality images.

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Not that difficult,

first you need a good design. If the original visuals are bad you cannot do anything at all.

then you need to know which file format is good for where, PNG for most at the moment, GIF for very low color counts and animations, JPGs for Photos which thumbs PNG as PNG file size becomes too big at photos.

And finally compression of JPGs. Every image should be checked with human eye for exporting with right compression values, for example JPGs are bugged with red if you compress it too much reds in jpgs become very nasty looking.

Good designers with sense of file size still pay attention to compression values but most are now just using PNGs and no compression values for JPG images to avoid such decays in quality.

And also using the right software is essential, Photoshop and Fireworks are 2 most popular ones that handle image exporting pretty decently. For me Fireworks knocks out PS bad for web exporting :)

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