A coworker asked me today about image resizing, and I mentioned to him a “cheat” I have used that he said he hadn’t thought of. Typically, when you reduce the size of an image in a graphics program, you get smoothing that fuzzes the picture. Not the best result. Sharpening the image then yanks colors apart so that, for instance, black text looks like it’s bleeding yellow and pink.

Applications like InDesign and Word resize more gracefully, but I’ve tried moving a resized image out of InDesign, and it doesn’t work.

The workaround I have used when constrained to certain image sizes applies mostly to Web applications or sites because what I do is change the text size in the browser.

For example, in Internet Explorer 7, I would go to View > Text Size > Smaller. If the page isn’t hard-coded with text sizes like 14px or 11pt, the text size will decrease. This typically allows more to fit in a certain area when I take a screenshot. If the text was a decent size to begin with, it will probably still be readable one size smaller. The biggest benefit is that you may not have to resize the image. Compare these two identically-sized images of the About Gmail page:

The difference may not be apparent at first, but if you look more closely, the second image displays the entire menu on the left, and more text is shown throughout.

Not mind-blowing, but it’s a little technique that may allow you to save some space with your images or to show more within a certain size of image. Since my colleague hadn’t thought of it before, I thought I’d share.