Images comprize 65% of the bytes transmitted over the web everyday. As a result of their file size, they considerably slow down the web experience. Google, by no means, wants to make the world dull and bland by removing images from the web. Instead, the search giant is promoting a new lossy image format called WebP. WebP can help reduce the file size of images by 40 percent compared to JPEG (JPG) format images. This would be big win for web designers and web developers, as their creations can run at faster speeds with less hangups. WebP image format is based on open source technology.

There is a downside to the WebP image format. They can take up to eight times longer to encode than traditional JPEGs.

The BBC undergoes a re-design to it’s website, which produces a huge outpouring of comments on the BBC editor’s blog. Already the editor’s blog contains 2000 comments–many of which are negative.

The new web design makes the interface cleaner and adds a lot of white space. The side navigation has been removed and the number of article related imagery has been reduced. Overall, the new design tries to reduce the overall clutter and clarify and remove distractions from the top stories. Access to social links has been improved as well.

Many of the negative responses found in the Editor’s Blog are aesthetic or taste focused–although many say that the new design is too simple or difficult to use in general. For example, one reader writes “new look makes the BBC Website seem like a less sophisticated version of the CNN website.”

One observation that we noted was the obvious disconnect between the homepage of BBC.co.uk and the new news landing page BBC.co.uk/news. The navigation systems are different–to the point where even the reds that are used in the theme are inconsistent.

Using the Google Trends software, we conducted an interesting but very, very simple search for two keywords: “web design” and “graphic design.” The results show a decline in worldwide search volume for both keywords from 2003 until the present day.

Using the Trends filter, we focused on the US search volume for “web design” and “graphic design,” which showed a parallel trend to the present day.

For US search volume, the top states (labeled Sub regions) represented in Trends were as follows:

1.     Utah, United States
2.     Florida, United States
3.     Nevada, United States
4.     Oregon, United States
5.     Colorado, United States

In contrast, the above graph shows that news volume for the keyterms “web design” and “graphic design” have increased in 2007 with a gentle incline in reference volume for those keywords.